Position of least significant bit that is set
- by peterchen
I am looking for an efficient way to determine the position of the least significant bit that is set in an integer, e.g. for 0x0FF0 it would be 4.
A trivial implementation is this:
unsigned GetLowestBitPos(unsigned value)
{
assert(value != 0); // handled separately
unsigned pos = 0;
while (!(value & 1))
{
value >>= 1;
++pos;
}
return pos;
}
Any ideas how to squeeze some cycles out of it?
(Note: this question is for people that enjoy such things, not for people to tell me xyzoptimization is evil.)
[edit] Thanks everyone for the ideas! I've learnt a few other things, too. Cool!
