Do bit operations cause programs to run slower?

Posted by flashnik on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by flashnik
Published on 2010-05-10T22:10:06Z Indexed on 2010/05/10 22:24 UTC
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I'm dealing with a problem which needs to work with a lot of data. Currently its values are represented as an unsigned int. I know that real values do not exceed a limit of 1000.

Questions

  1. I can use unsigned short to store it. An upside to this is that it'll use less storage space to store the value. Will performance suffer?

  2. If I decided to store data as short but all the calling functions use int, it's recognized that I need to convert between these datatypes when storing or extracting values. Will performance suffer? Will the loss in performance be dramatic?

  3. If I decided to not use short but just 10 bits packed into an array of unsigned int. What will happen in this case comparing with previous ones?

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