Everyone Should Know SIMD
Mitchell Hashimoto gives SIMD the right entry point: recognize the common shape before reaching for cleverness. Broadcast a constant, process a vector-width chunk, reduce the result, and retain the scalar loop for the tail and unsupported hardware. The Zig examples are approachable, but the bigger lesson travels: performance work begins by understanding the data path, not by memorizing intrinsics.
The Hacker News pushback improves the thesis. Manual SIMD is not simply a more verbose for loop, and it is not the first move for every hot path. The durable skill is knowing when vectorization did not happen, checking optimized compiler output and benchmarks, then deciding whether the extra code, portability surface, and memory behavior justify taking control.