It's great experience, but it's also slow as the compier must save the entire function state before your assembly block and cannot make any assumptions about what you do inside.

This is acceptable if you see the point of inline assembly in writing long code sections, but that's not what inine assembly is meant to solve. If you want to write long sections of assembly code, just put the whole thing into an assembly source file and link it into your binary.

gcc-style inline assembly on the other hand is designed to solve the problem of augmenting code generation with individual instructions the compiler doesn't know about. Correctly used, gcc-style asm statements typically only hold one or two instructions that are then integrated into a complex function with little to no overhead. And for this usage, the syntax and model provided by gcc is perfectly fine. It only fails if you misuse it for writing long chunks of assembly code, something for which you should have used an assembly file in the first place.