So yeah, we cannot expect NEON on Debian armhf. But I did not expect these compile time errors... I would hope that one could at least compile some NEON code on Debian armhf, and then maybe do some runtime conditional test to only execute NEON if it is available.
This code has not compiled on Debian for a while, so I am bringing back a debian-armhf-convert-without-neon patch I used before. -Maitland