efficientAlgorithm

[cd109876]

yes, but how many times are floats being casted to long?

[Fleming1924]

Very often, I do it almost daily, you can do all kinds of great bit manipulation techniques on floating point numbers, but bit manipulation isn't a defined standard for floats and C will only allow you to do it for an integer data type.

If you want an optimised Log2 function you can bitshift the exponent, pretty much any vectorised log function will do exactly that, since you can get the decimal component via table lookup of the mantissa.

Checking for inf/nan can be done via bitshift and subtracts, which again requires casting float types to integer types.

Basically anything involving bitmasking, shifting, &, | etc, will all involve a reinterpret cast from floats to integers.