Some application programming interfaces (API), for example, AltiVec and OpenMP, use intrinsic functions to declare, respectively, vectorizable and multiprocessing-aware operations during compiling.
The compiler parses the intrinsic functions and converts them into vector math or multiprocessing object code appropriate for the target platform.
[2] Compilers for C and C++, of Microsoft,[3] Intel,[1] and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)[4] implement intrinsics that map directly to the x86 single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instructions (MMX, Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE), SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, AVX, AVX2, AVX512, FMA, ...).
[5] It is common for C++ libraries, such as glm or Sony's vector maths libraries,[6] to achieve portability via conditional compilation (based on platform specific compiler flags), providing fully portable high-level primitives (e.g., a four-element floating-point vector type) mapped onto the appropriate low level programming language implementations, while still benefiting from the C++ type system and inlining; hence the advantage over linking to hand-written assembly object files, using the C application binary interface (ABI).
[9] These are conventionally grouped as follows:[10]: 337–338 Individual compilers have added additional builtins specific to a machine architecture or operating system.