On: The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026

[jedisct1]

As someone who had pretty much given up on Rust after being very disappointed with its SIMD support, and had stopped following developments in that area, I was genuinely surprised to see someone announce this today:

https://val.markovic.io/articles/philbin-the-safest-and-fast...

Performance is competitive with Zig, without using the "unsafe" keyword or nightly Rust.

Nice.

[syncontrol → jedisct1]

Thanks, Frank. :)

NGL, SIMD in Rust has not been a great experience. Philbin uses the "CPU Feature Tokens" pattern that the Fearless SIMD team (which the root article's author is a part of) came up with: https://shnatsel.medium.com/safe-simd-in-rust-even-on-the-in...

The pattern provides a safe abstraction for runtime CPU detection and SIMD dispatch. It's gnarly AF, but Fearless SIMD 1.0 came out a few days ago so people won't have to implement it themselves anymore.

I'd recommend grabbing that lib and giving SIMD-in-Rust another shot.