What is the fastest/most efficient way to find the highest set bit (msb) in an integer in C?

Question

If I have some integer n, and I want to know the position of the most significant bit (that is, if the least significant bit is on the right, I want to know the position of

Answer 1

Assuming you're on x86 and game for a bit of inline assembler, Intel provides a BSR instruction ("bit scan reverse"). It's fast on some x86s (microcoded on others). From the manual:

Searches the source operand for the most significant set bit (1 bit). If a most significant 1 bit is found, its bit index is stored in the destination operand. The source operand can be a register or a memory location; the destination operand is a register. The bit index is an unsigned offset from bit 0 of the source operand. If the content source operand is 0, the content of the destination operand is undefined.

(If you're on PowerPC there's a similar cntlz ("count leading zeros") instruction.)

Example code for gcc:

#include 

int main (int,char**)
{
  int n=1;
  for (;;++n) {
    int msb;
    asm("bsrl %1,%0" : "=r"(msb) : "r"(n));
    std::cout << n << " : " << msb << std::endl;
  }
  return 0;
}

See also this inline assembler tutorial, which shows (section 9.4) it being considerably faster than looping code.