Position of least significant bit that is set

Question

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 impleme

Answer 1

There is an x86 assembly instruction (bsf) that will do it. :)

More optimized?!

Side Note:

Optimization at this level is inherently architecture dependent. Today's processors are too complex (in terms of branch prediction, cache misses, pipelining) that it's so hard to predict which code is executed faster on which architecture. Decreasing operations from 32 to 9 or things like that might even decrease the performance on some architectures. Optimized code on a single architecture might result in worse code in the other. I think you'd either optimize this for a specific CPU or leave it as it is and let the compiler to choose what it thinks it's better.