A large part of the asm => C and C => C++ moves is that C and C++ very ,very strictly follow the principle that you pay only for what you use, and that pretty much all C and C++ environments makes inline assembler quite easy to do.

In other words: You can write C++ that is no slower than C, and you can write C that is only rarely slower than ASM, and in both cases, in the few situations where the performance difference is large enough to be noticeable and matter, you can still easily write asm.

This is also why C and C++ keeps being used in the face of so many higher level languages.

And I say this as someone who spends most of his time writing Ruby, and who haven't even bothered upgrading to MRI 2.x despite the performance improvements available.

In other words: I agree with your first line. But moving to C/C++ is a totally different tradeoff than moving to most higher level languages, most of which at the very least makes the performance characteristics much harder to predict.