by using a lookup table instead of a naive shift-and-count loop. Based on
code originally posted by Sean Eron Anderson at
http://graphics.stanford.edu/%7eseander/bithacks.html.
Greg Stark did the research and benchmarking to show that this is what
we should use. Jeremy Kerr first noticed that this is a hotspot that
could be optimized, though we ended up not using his suggestion of
platform-specific bit-searching code.
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