Performance Characteristics

Bitwise operations are:

• Extremely fast: Usually single CPU cycle instructions
• Memory efficient: No allocation needed
• Deterministic: O(1) time complexity

They’re faster than:

• Arithmetic operations (though modern CPUs make these nearly as fast)
• Function calls
• Pattern matching
• Pretty much everything except register moves

This makes them ideal for:

• Hot paths in performance-critical code
• Bit flag manipulation
• Checksums and hash functions
• Low-level protocol parsing