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Message: [QUOTE="pete, post: 3126508"] (i) is the wrong type. It should be unsigned. If (i) has a value of (-1), then how many bits are set in (i) depends on which of three representations is used, but bitcount will always return the number of bits used by two's complement representation. The last time that I was looking cpu's was in the 1990's. At that time, typically, a conditional jump took about twice as long as an integer addition operation. By every metric I know for guessing how fast a function will be, bit_count should be faster than bitcount. unsigned bit_count(unsigned n) { unsigned count; for (count = 0; n != 0; n &= n - 1) { ++count; } return count; } [/QUOTE]