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Just a couple of days ago, I wanted to implement specialized StreamVByte decoding in Zig, but @shuffle() needs to mask to be compile time known, while _mm_shuffle_epi8() works just fine with a dynamic mask. I remember that some time ago, I couldn't find an alternative to _mm_alignr_epi8().

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`_mm_alignr_epi8` is a compile-time known shuffle that gets optimized well by LLVM [1].

If you need the exact behavior of `pshufb` you can use asm or the llvm intrinsic [2]. iirc, I once got the compiler to emit a `pshufb` for a runtime shuffle... that always guaranteed indices in the 0..15 range?

Ironically, I also wanted to try zig by doing a StreamVByte implementation, but got derailed by the lack of SSE/AVX intrinsics support.

[1] https://github.com/aqrit/sse2zig/blob/444ed8d129625ab5deec34... [2] https://github.com/aqrit/sse2zig/blob/444ed8d129625ab5deec34...

Oh, that's actually quite neat, it did not occur to me that you can use @shuffle with a compile time mask and it will optimize it to a specialized instruction.

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