Bitwise division

Integer division is expensive. Much more expensive than multiplication. Much, much more expensive than addition. If you’re trying to make some integer operations really fast it’s bad news if you need to do division. A while ago, for a hobby project, I happened to be playing around with variable-length integer encodings. Where you store integers such that small ones take up less space than large on

[htsnul]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34981027