I propose that we go ahead and enabled SLP by default. Over the last few weeks, @luke and I have been working through codegen issues seen at small VLs from a couple of SPEC workloads. We still have a ways to go to get optimal codegen, but we're at the point where having a single configuration we're all tuning against is probably the right default.
As a bit of history, I introduced this TTI hook back in a310637132 back in August of last year to unblock enabling LoopVectorizer. At the time, we had a couple known issues: constant materialization, address generation, and a general lack of maturity of small fixed vector codegen. By now, each of these has had significant investment. I can't say any of them are completely fixed, but we're no longer seeing instances of them every place we look.
What we're mostly seeing at this point is a long tail of code gen opportunities, many involving build vectors, shuffles, and extract patterns. I have a couple patches up to continue iterating on those issues, but I don't think they need to be blockers for enabling SLP. The only debateable one is D152001 , and I'm prepared to leave it up to which gets approved first. :)