Of course, use whatever you prefer. But the techniques I listed, which Linux kernel (and other software) relies on for performance, can't be done in C, can't b

Of course, use whatever you prefer. But the techniques I listed, which Linux kernel (and other software) relies on for performance, can't be done in C, can't be done with compiler intrinsics, and can't be done with basic asm in the style of DMD and MSVC either. A feature to add new program-specific intrinsics to the compiler would work, but I don't know of any compiler which offers that, and it would probably look like extended asm anyway. The GCC syntax isn't pretty. But I can't agree that it's inferior unless someone points to a better alternative that achieves similar results. I've written programs that were portable to both GCC and MSVC, using the inline asm syntax of both compilers. The MSVC version produced slower code, because there was no way to produce the asm I wanted using MSVC.