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

Putting this in since it's 'yet another' approach, seems to be different from others already given.

returns -1 if x==0, otherwise floor( log2(x)) (max result 31)

Reduce from 32 to 4 bit problem, then use a table. Perhaps inelegant, but pragmatic.

This is what I use when I don't want to use __builtin_clz because of portability issues.

To make it more compact, one could instead use a loop to reduce, adding 4 to r each time, max 7 iterations. Or some hybrid, such as (for 64 bits): loop to reduce to 8, test to reduce to 4.

int log2floor( unsigned x ){
   static const signed char wtab[16] = {-1,0,1,1, 2,2,2,2, 3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3};
   int r = 0;
   unsigned xk = x >> 16;
   if( xk != 0 ){
       r = 16;
       x = xk;
   }
   // x is 0 .. 0xFFFF
   xk = x >> 8;
   if( xk != 0){
       r += 8;
       x = xk;
   }
   // x is 0 .. 0xFF
   xk = x >> 4;
   if( xk != 0){
       r += 4;
       x = xk;
   }
   // now x is 0..15; x=0 only if originally zero.
   return r + wtab[x];
}