Bit Twiddling Logic on 64 bits

I decided on 64 bit headers. Since they will be used a lot, I want a fast scheme for compacting and extracting the fields. A problem which occurred to me: say you design an elaborate bit field scheme on 64 bits registers then you're bound to do exotic stuff like checking the 51th bit. If one isn't careful about it, that can generate lots of instructions with large 64 bit constants, or references to 64 bit constants.

So, 64 bit fields need a different approach than 8 bit fields.

Luckily, one can mostly rely on that smaller integer fields are cheaper, comparing to zero is normally cheap, and negating an integer is cheap too. I am not sure about taking the absolute value without branching.

I need the following:

• a bit to check whether a field is a constant series of bits,
• an integer field mapping to a record table (of strings),
• an integer field mapping to a type table (of strings),
• an integer describing the full size of the record.

I decided on distributing them on 1, 15, 16, 32 bit, without a real rationale other than that probably 64K of types is enough, and a large record size can be abused to implement arrays.

So I am thinking on using the signs of the fields to bit twiddle; or not even that, but just store the information. Like a negative record table value indicates a primitive value and a zero is reserved for thunks.