What is the fastest way to return the positions of all set bits in a 64-bit integer?

Question

I need a fast way to get the position of all one bits in a 64-bit integer. For example, given x = 123703, I\'d like to fill an array idx[] = {0, 1, 2, 4,

Answer 1

If I take "I need a fast way to get the position of all one bits in a 64-bit integer" literally...

I realise this is a few weeks old, however and out of curiosity, I remember way back in my assembly days with the CBM64 and Amiga using an arithmetic shift and then examining the carry flag - if it's set then the shifted bit was 1, if clear then it's zero

e.g. for an arithmetic shift left (examining from bit 64 to bit 0)....

pseudo code (ignore instruction mix etc errors and oversimplification...been a while):

    move #64+1, counter
    loop. ASL 64bitinteger       
    BCS carryset
    decctr. dec counter
    bne loop
    exit

    carryset. 
    //store #counter-1 (i.e. bit position) in datastruct indexed by counter
    jmp decctr

...I hope you get the idea.

I've not used assembly since then but I'm wondering if we could use some C++ in-line assembly similar to the above to do something similar here. We could do the whole conversion in assembly (very few lines of code), building up an appropriate data structure. C++ could simply examine the answer.

If this is possible then I'd imagine it to be pretty fast.