> These days, the best bet for beating the compiler is to use vendor intrinsics (for SIMD, encryption, bit-twiddling, etc)
Well, I would not count that as "beating" the compiler so much, but as "using it", "helping it", or something like that. ;-)
Anyway, when I still wrote C code for a living, we were using the OpenWatcom compiler, and as far as I could figure out at the time, it made no effort whatsoever to support SIMD, and the only way to use them was to drop to assembly. (OpenWatcom's support for inline assembly and even inline binary code was very nice, though.)
Well, I would not count that as "beating" the compiler so much, but as "using it", "helping it", or something like that. ;-)
Anyway, when I still wrote C code for a living, we were using the OpenWatcom compiler, and as far as I could figure out at the time, it made no effort whatsoever to support SIMD, and the only way to use them was to drop to assembly. (OpenWatcom's support for inline assembly and even inline binary code was very nice, though.)