Home/ Questions/Q 7178807
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-28T16:59:42+00:00

Possible Duplicate: Where would I use a bitwise operator in JavaScript? In c/c++ bitwise

  • 0

Possible Duplicate:
Where would I use a bitwise operator in JavaScript?

In c/c++ bitwise operations are faster than normal(arithmetic) operations(significant atleast in low performance processors). Does the same apply in js? I don’t think as the reason its faster in c is bitwise operations are hardwired and usually are completed in 1 processor cycle. But js runs within browser which doesn’t have any such hardware(registers I mean) access. I am not sure (around 70% sure 🙂 ). What are typical(or some smarter) uses of bitwise operators (especially in js but I would like to know others too). Please correct me if I am wrong anywhere.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Bitwise operators in JS are slow. Really slow compared to C. The reason is that in JS, all numbers are represented as double-precision floating point numbers, so to perform a bitwise operation, the runtime has to convert them to 32-bit integers and back.

    That’s not to say they aren’t useful. e.g., Node#compareDocumentPosition returns a bitmask, and something.length >>> 0 is a common way of getting the length property of something or zero if length isn’t a number or is NaN. Also, a / b | 0 is a fast way to do Math.floor(a / b), assuming a and b are >= 0.

    • 0