Intrinsics-heavy code does looks scary because you see tons of weirdly-named functions with no clue as to what they do. However, you can learn the basics in an

Intrinsics-heavy code does looks scary because you see tons of weirdly-named functions with no clue as to what they do. However, you can learn the basics in an hour, and read/write small amounts of code (like in the article) very quickly. The trick that you don't learn all those functions, instead you constantly use the amazing interactive guide: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/intrinsics-guide/index.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/intrinsics-guid... I guess real pros do memorize the API of course, but I have written many (<1000) lines of intrinsics code like this.