alt Hacker News> I think a legitimate criticism is that it is unclear who std::simd is for
It's for people that don't use SIMD today.
SIMD is hard, or at least nuanced and platform-dependant. To say that std::simd doesn't lower the learning curve is intellectually dishonest.
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Despite the title, the primary criticism of the article is that the compilers' auto-vectorizers have improved better than the current shipped stdlib version.
My criticism could mostly be summarized similarly. The scope of what a portable std::simd can do is almost exactly the scope that you would expect auto-vectorization to subsume over time. SIMD, to the extent it is covered by std::simd, is the part of SIMD that should be pretty simple to learn.
There isn’t an obvious path to elevate it above what auto-vectorization should theoretically be capable of in a portable way. This leads to a potential long-term outcome where std::simd is essentially a no-op because scalar code is automagically converted into the equivalent and it is incapable of supporting more sophisticated SIMD code.