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What's the purpose of the excessive quantity of leading underscores on every variable? Are they intended to communicate something special?


None of the variables there have leading underscores in the name. If you mean the type __m512i, possibly to avoid conflicting with user-defined types in C, which has no namespacing to avoid such conflicts and sort of "softly reserves" names starting with underscores for non-user-defined names.


Double underscores are reserved by the C standard (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230109-00/?p=10...), so it's a measure to avoid collisions with user-defined types.


It's just a convention for SIMD functions and types.




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