What should it choose then? I have a Zen 3 processor, and benchmarking some simd I did recently says 32 byte or 64 byte chunks was fastest. But I'm sure I'd get a different result on a different Zen, and different again on Intel's.
How would the library decide what SIMD width I should use?
What you'd actually want is a matrix of variant implementations burned into the binary, with runtime (or process-boot-time) hardware detection that swaps symbols out to point to the correct variant.
If that's the case, then the selection logic would be trivial: figure out the full hierarchical ID of the uarch you're running on, then search for the longest prefix match in the table of available impls.
If things work more like you're imagining, though, then I suppose the process-boot impl-selector would narrow down the impl matrix to just the subset that are legal on the running uarch; pick one arbitrarily to be active at first; and then wrap the calls in a handler that gradually re-works the called function in a way reminiscent of a profile-guided JIT, but without the need to actually synthesize any code at runtime — instead, it'd just be a multi-armed bandit passing-through-to and re-ranking competitor impls, with decreasing sampling of the non-first-ranked impls as confidence-in-score-separation increases.