I don't have experience with SIMD, and for the things I do I couldn't care less. I like C as a super-productive language that doesn't get in my way. The output from unoptimized code is magnitudes faster than what I get from higher level scripting languages. And much more efficient than with GC languages for any non-trivial stuff. And I can write that code almost as quick as Python or Java code, and with very little debugging time (after some years of experience).
I might be in the minority, but to me, C is as high-level as we should go, for many many problems. If you really care about registers and SIMD stuff, then your concerns are architecture specific, and that's not really what C does well. What C does is mostly abstracting registers. Why blame it for that? The few places where you need SIMD, well, just insert architecture specific code there.
Is there a way to write portable code that can be better optimized?
I might be in the minority, but to me, C is as high-level as we should go, for many many problems. If you really care about registers and SIMD stuff, then your concerns are architecture specific, and that's not really what C does well. What C does is mostly abstracting registers. Why blame it for that? The few places where you need SIMD, well, just insert architecture specific code there.
Is there a way to write portable code that can be better optimized?