In compiler theory, an intrinsic function is a function available in a given language whose implementation is handled specially by the compiler. Typically, it substitutes a sequence of automatically-generated instructions for the original function call, similar to an inline function. Compilers that implement intrinsic functions generally enable them only when the user has requested optimization, falling back to a default implementation provided by the language runtime environment otherwise.

Intrinsic functions are often used to explicitly implement vectorization and parallelization in languages which do not address such constructs. Altivec and OpenMP are examples of APIs which use intrinsic functions to declare, respectively, vectorizable and multiprocessor-aware operations during compilation. The compiler parses the intrinsic functions and converts them into vector math or multiprocessing object code appropriate for the target platform.

Compiler theory