Yes, I'm a bit jaded on C++, despite using it regularly. And a functional programming approach here would suffer the same issues as an object oriented approach

Yes, I'm a bit jaded on C++, despite using it regularly. And a functional programming approach here would suffer the same issues as an object oriented approach. The issue with both is that they like to operate on the data elements one at a time, and lay out each element in memory interleaved, and this is not what you want for SIMD most of the time. Actually functional code tends to want to abstract these details from you, which defeats a lot of the point of SIMD... so I'll ignore that.