Your experience matches mine, you can get a lot done with the portable SIMD in Clang/GCC/Rust but you can't avoid the platform specific stuff when you need spec

Your experience matches mine, you can get a lot done with the portable SIMD in Clang/GCC/Rust but you can't avoid the platform specific stuff when you need specialized instructions. Depends on the domain you work in how much you need to resort to platform specific intrinsics. For me dabbling in computer graphics and game physics, almost all of the code is portable except for some rare specialized instructions here and there. For someone working in specialized domains (like video codecs) or hardware (HPC super computers) the balance might be the other way around.