[krick]

It's funny, but I find your example way more illustrative and deserving to be shared on HN, than the original post. Honestly, I don't find microbenchmarks that compelling, because there are too many caveats to take them seriously without really understanding what's happening under the hood. And I wouldn't participate in arguing about manual vs auto-vectorization, because these are just 2 different use-cases, so there's no question for me that auto-vectorization being possible in the language is just better than it being impossible. (I mean, disregarding the programming, writing kind-of-imperative formula when discussing math can serve a purpose, as it is a different perspective, than writing the same thing declaratively. I would prefer "vectorized" declarative form in the most cases, but surely one can find exceptions, where M[i,j] = ... is just much clearer.)

But your comment just vividly shows, how much proficiency in writing clear code actually matters.