Ways to do modulo multiplication with primitive types

Question

Is there a way to build e.g. (853467 * 21660421200929) % 100000000000007 without BigInteger libraries (note that each number fits into a 64 bit integer but the

Answer 1

Keith Randall's answer is good, but as he said, a caveat is that it works only if m is 63 bits or less.

Here is a modification which has two advantages:

1. It works even if m is 64 bits.
2. It doesn't need to use the modulo operation, which can be expensive on some processors.

(Note that the res -= m and temp_b -= m lines rely on 64-bit unsigned integer overflow in order to give the expected results. This should be fine since unsigned integer overflow is well-defined in C and C++. For this reason it's important to use unsigned integer types.)

uint64_t mulmod(uint64_t a, uint64_t b, uint64_t m) {
    uint64_t res = 0;
    uint64_t temp_b;

    /* Only needed if b may be >= m */
    if (b >= m) {
        if (m > UINT64_MAX / 2u)
            b -= m;
        else
            b %= m;
    }

    while (a != 0) {
        if (a & 1) {
            /* Add b to res, modulo m, without overflow */
            if (b >= m - res) /* Equiv to if (res + b >= m), without overflow */
                res -= m;
            res += b;
        }
        a >>= 1;

        /* Double b, modulo m */
        temp_b = b;
        if (b >= m - b)       /* Equiv to if (2 * b >= m), without overflow */
            temp_b -= m;
        b += temp_b;
    }
    return res;
}