In the simplest cases, sure. But inferring that amount of information in general programs is very much an open problem. Even with GCC, which incorporates what

In the simplest cases, sure. But inferring that amount of information in general programs is very much an open problem. Even with GCC, which incorporates what is roughly (at least within an order of magnitude) state-of-the-art autovectorization, you have to be careful how you write your loops and structure your arrays or the compiler won't pick up on it. Here's an example in Haskell: consider the case that the list of numbers was generated from a list of some other structure; something like "map x coordinates" to get all the X values from a list of X-Y-Z coordinates. For vectorization to work, those values need to be packed together in memory; however the structure isn't organized as such (at best, you'd have XYZXYZXYZ). That means a nontrivial memory copy, which will cost much more than the vectorization will gain you. So the structure needs to be reorganized, but then that might cause other pessimizations.