With respect to your hi tech opinion guys, you will be surprised what C alone can do when you write your program PROPERLY.
How about doing everything in C first which 90% of the time does the job perfectly, when you get some problems due to constraints as both of you stated you start looking for optimization, Wheather it is mixing with assembly or getting a higher speed processor or writting your code differently.
It is not an issue of writting the most efficient and shortest code possible, it is an issue of getting your job done and to maintain it for future updates and bug fixes easily.
Regards
Mahmood