Humans are still better at this given time. Check out sm64’s decomp quality

The mythological idea of them just appearing out of nowhere is nice too. Makes it feel aligned with something like the pyramids having no explanation

It boggles me we completely forgot that the world operated like this just 4 years ago

The next step of going SOA benefits from all of the above, it just further unlocks you packed quad and oct instructions (AVX256 and 512 depending if you buy AMD or not).

A quick restrict example:

    #define fn __attribute__((used))

    fn void copy1(int* to, const int* from, const int size)
    {
        for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
            to[i] = from[i];
    }

    fn void copy2(int* to, const int* from)
    {   
        constexpr int size = 1024;
        for(int i = 0; i < size; i++) 
            to[i] = from[i];
    }

    fn void copy3(int* restrict to, const int* restrict from)
    {
        constexpr int size = 1024;
        for(int i = 0; i < size; i++) 
            to[i] = from[i];
    }

    gcc test.c -c -O3 && objdump -d ./test.o

This is a good starting point for self teaching. The impact of your TLB, L1, and overall instruction count (with IPC) can further be measured with `./perf stat -d -d -d ./a.out`. If you want a quick rule of thumb, no instructions are fast instructions.

Engineering needs to be failure free, or at least failure preventive via redundancy, and the latter requires the same full systems understands as the former