When doing arithmetic in a programming language there is the arcane art of optimizing with the help of bit-wise operations. Of course I’m talking about Bit Hacks.

On a readability and maintainability ranking from 1 to awk Bit Hacks reach a level of Brainfuck. Yet they can be an incredibly low-level optimization useful to tweak the last bit of performance out of an operation but are difficult to get right and 100% portable.

In this post we’ll take a look at a rather easy function - clz(x) that will return the number of leading zero bits in an unsigned integer type x. In particular I’ll show you how to properly wrap GCC’s __builtin_clz().

About two months ago I wrote the following r/cpp comment:

In the thread a new library was presented. One user complained about the long namespace name, (s)he got the above replies. Judging by the number of upvotes, people seemed to agree with my comment. In this blog post I am going to elaborate it.

But first, let me tell you a little story about me.

Traits classes are very powerful. They allow to associate information and functionality with arbitrary classes in a non-intrusive way. This makes it possible to use any type in a certain template as long as all access is done through the traits and there is an appropriate specialization.

The default specialization often just forwards to a member function. But for some functionality the types don’t necessarily need to provide it, it’s optional. Then the traits define a default implementation that is used as a fallback. In this post, I will show you how to implement such traits classes.

Overload resolution is one of C++ most complicated things and yet it works most of the time without the need to think about it. In this mini-series, I will show you how to control this complex machinery so it is even more powerful and completely under your control.

The fourth post shows you a weirdly named and powerful alternative to tag dispatching: SFINAE.

Overload resolution is one of C++ most complicated things and yet it works most of the time without the need to think about it. In this mini-series, I will show you how to control this complex machinery so it is even more powerful and completely under your control.

The third post shows you the power of tag dispatching to select from multiple implementations of a (templated) function. This allows powerful optimization for types with special properties.