[nullc]

Stockholm syndrome, CPU makers have been needlessly starving us of highly useful bit manipulation and finite field operations ... so you're very thankful for what you get. :)

Base RISCV even lacks CLZ/popcount -- so it's a step backward from other popular architectures.

That said the stuff in bitmanip and crypto looks pretty good, so if they actually end up in chips that will be nice. On the other hand it's not clear how much awesome code will get written really exploiting them when they aren't everywhere-- which is probably why we're in this situation to begin with.

[glangdale]

Maybe you're right, although 'Stockholm syndrome' feels a bit strong.

Agreed that stuff like CLZ/popcount/rotate etc should not be tucked away in a weird extension. I'm a bit alarmed at RISC-V's tendency to fragment into a gazillion subsets (the argument is that it's better to at least define the subsets rather than have a nightmare of incompatible and overlapping extensions, but still).