In fact, C++26 made some considerable progress on that front.

https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/experimental/simd

An implementation of which exists in the following GitHub repo (albeit implemented in the xvec::simd namespace rather than std::simd...but otherwise intended to be spec-compliant).

https://github.com/intel/xvec

Speaking as a long-time C++ developer...I wasn't uninterested in contracts (which I've known about since the days of Bertrand Meyer flogging them in Eiffel), but I agree with the sentiment here that the SIMD efforts were considerably more interesting.