The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026

I am hoping for portable SIMD so much. But I still think that often a manually rolled SIMD will be faster.

Also the state of SIMD in Cranelift is also very WIP. They pretty much just support a subset of 128bit vectors with some rare exceptions.

I am using my own lib, `lin_alg`, which apes core_simd for floating point values, and extends the concept to vectors and quaternions. I will eventually replace the floating point portions with core::simd upon its arrival in stable Rust.

Downside: It's currently x86 only.

Hot take: there is no portable SIMD.

You can either have performance (=write manual ASM for each platform), or portability, but not both.

What so-called "portable SIMD" libraries give you is "portable auto-vectorization". "Portable performance" is a global property of the algorithm. Relying on auto-vectorization will result in e.g. sub-optimal register spills in practice. The microbenchmarks will look great, though. ;)

Can we start using stainless steel instead?

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