Practical Cross Platform SIMD Math

No, pass by value is a lot faster if the values being passed can be passed in registers, which is the case with SIMD vector values and inline functions. Passing by pointer adds restrictions to what the compiler can optimize and in the worst case you actually end up pushing values to the stack just to read them back to registers in the called function.

I recently spent a good deal of time looking at assembly code emitted by compilers when doing SIMD code with C and intrinsics. On GCC and Clang pass by value and force_inline functions gave the best results (at least until link time optimization becomes more mainstream). This was even the case with 4x4 matrix structs, not just SIMD vectors.

The speed is not in getting individual functions to work fast, but to let the compiler inline and combine several function calls together and keeping live values in registers from one function to another.

Here's my SIMD math lib: https://github.com/rikusalminen/threedee-simd

Return Value Optimization is a generally implemented optimization technique that makes most value returns equivalent to reference passing and is allowed by the standard.