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> I simply meant that the bare xxxintrin.h stuff is annoying enough that if you're using it directly you might as well write assembly.

The compiler is aware of many of those intrinsics and can perform optimizations around them. Hand rolling all of that in Assembly would be quite the chore. Using these intrinsics is, IMO, considerably easier.

As another example, this morning I needed to perform a small convolution in an inner loop. Since I'm targeting x64 under the msvc compiler I can't write an external assembly function and have it inlined into the inner loop. Therefore I was left with just using the raw intrinsics from intrin.h for like, 10 lines of code. The simplicity of the convolution means the compiler will have no problems generating optimal code.

For me the ugliness of the intrinsics has gone away, like parens do for a lisp programmer.

As I get more familiar with rust macros I may compress this down a bunch. It will make it easier to maintain.