Quote Originally Posted by danutz_plusplus
Ok. I get it. You can do anything in asm that you could do in a hl language because in the end they're practically the same. But then why is asm avoided, and it's only used in some parts, where speed and efficiency is of the essence. It's because of the time it would take to develop a full fledged application, right?
The only reason for this is due to the lack of commercial support for assembler. Assembly tends to be less portable (though an assembler such as gas is able to transcend across different processors) than the average HLL.

However, some modern high level and macro assemblers and assembly IDE projects have narrowed the gap, making development in assembly about as fast as development with HLL.

Some assemblers to consider:
MASM - Win32 only
FASM - portable Win32-64, 'nix32-64 and several others
NASM - portable Win32-64, 'nix32-64, and several others
HLA - portable Win32, 'nix32 (more to come)
ROSASM - Win32 only