SIMD is really a big omission if you do a low level language these days. A modern language should really have first class vector types. I'm talking about static

SIMD is really a big omission if you do a low level language these days. A modern language should really have first class vector types. I'm talking about static sized small vectors that run on SIMD, e.g. 4 x float32 or 8 x uint8. Not something matlab-esque. Something along the lines of OpenGL shading language, OpenCL C or relevant vector extensions in modern C compilers. With GCC and Clang vector extensions, SIMD programming is fairly nice. (NOTE: GCC 4.8/git version vector extensions emit bad scalar NEON assembly so you can't really use them if you target ARM). One particular thing about SIMD coding is the shuffling instructions which are hard to express in normal programming language terms as the order of the shuffling has to be static. GCC and Clang both have a shuffling function that requires the parameters to be compile time constants. But I prefer GLSL/OpenCL shuffle syntax, like vec.xxyy or vec.wzyx or vec.s0s0s1s1, and combinations like (vec4)(vec1.xx, vec2.yy). Too bad this syntax is not available on Clang or GCC when doing normal CPU C code. NEON's shuffling instructions are rather odd to deal with. An odd thing about them is that Clang's ARM intrinsics actually use __builtin_shufflevector to implement NEON shuffles like vrev.