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Just chatting with AI makes me smarter (C Intrinsics)

felt my IQ go up just by talking to Claude Code today. We were discussing low-level optimizations for my allocator.

Me: "I see. So using intrinsics is basically calling raw CPU instructions directly from C?"

Claude: "Exactly. It goes like this: C Code → Compiler Intrinsic → CPU Instruction"

Here is the quick mapping list we discussed:

Use Case,GCC/Clang Intrinsic,CPU Instruction (x86)
Prefetching,builtin_prefetch,prefetcht0
Atomic Ops,
atomic_load,lock cmpxchg
Bit Counting,builtin_popcount,popcnt
Branch Hint,
builtin_expect,(Compiler Optimization)
Memory Fence,__atomic_thread_fence,mfence

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