Erik said,
"That said, often the approach is much more important than the language. E.g. a table driven lookup in C can be much faster than a calculation in assembler."

Absolutely.

My point was that, in order to determine which is "best" [1], you must be able to understand the assembler.

How can you know whether the table-driven lookup in C is going to be faster than the calculation in assembler unless you can understand the assembler in both cases!

[1] The criteria for determining "best" will, of course, depend upon the application:
- smallest code size?
- fastest execution?
- least memory requirement?
- etc, etc.

Yes, in many cases just writing in 'C' will be sufficient; but, sooner or later, you will come to a point when these issues become critical - and that's not a good time to start trying to understand assembler!