I've done several embedded projects in the past 5-10 years years. Mostly it's a matter of writing just enough assembly to get things running, and flipping into C when humanly possible because life is short.
Talk to old video game veterans [waves]. We wrote tons of assembly because there wasn't much choice. But these were largely 8-bit processors, the compilers weren't any good and the code space was constrained. But I was talking with a guy recently who said he'd written hundreds of thousands of lines of 68K assembly, and I have no idea why you would do that because 68K C compilers, Pascal compilers, anything compilers were pretty good even back in the benighted 80s. Well, better than assembly.
Of course, once you flip into C you're still not in an environment where you have much of a runtime (I kept having to explain to a contractor why he couldn't do heap operations in an early boot phase, much less expect the results to be addressable later).
Even in a very code-space sensitive project, I started off with a tiny bit of assembly, then made everything more or less functional in C, then went back and hand-coded routines as we needed to get bytes back: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1911
My level of fascination with an architecture can be dramatically by the quality of the available tooling. If there's nothing then that's fine, green fields are great fun. But if the tooling sucks (TI and your DSP software, I'm looking at you) or is horridly expensive, then I'm usually going to look for excuses to use something else.
Talk to old video game veterans [waves]. We wrote tons of assembly because there wasn't much choice. But these were largely 8-bit processors, the compilers weren't any good and the code space was constrained. But I was talking with a guy recently who said he'd written hundreds of thousands of lines of 68K assembly, and I have no idea why you would do that because 68K C compilers, Pascal compilers, anything compilers were pretty good even back in the benighted 80s. Well, better than assembly.
Of course, once you flip into C you're still not in an environment where you have much of a runtime (I kept having to explain to a contractor why he couldn't do heap operations in an early boot phase, much less expect the results to be addressable later).
Even in a very code-space sensitive project, I started off with a tiny bit of assembly, then made everything more or less functional in C, then went back and hand-coded routines as we needed to get bytes back: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1911
My level of fascination with an architecture can be dramatically by the quality of the available tooling. If there's nothing then that's fine, green fields are great fun. But if the tooling sucks (TI and your DSP software, I'm looking at you) or is horridly expensive, then I'm usually going to look for excuses to use something else.