Yes, everything works better with intrinsics: - codegen because the compiler spills better than you, and knows what register to save. It knows about register r

Yes, everything works better with intrinsics: - codegen because the compiler spills better than you, and knows what register to save. It knows about register renaming - inlining works better - loop unrolling works better - any kind of hoisting And it's also 3x faster to write, and much faster to refactor back to C++. Provided you have the right backend, it will lead to less maintenance issue with about 5% better performance.