Daniel DeLorme wrote:
> I believe I managed to close the performance gap to only 6% slower than 
> the current implementation (but I must admit I have trouble getting 
> consistently reproducible benchmarks). The attached patch should be 
> added on top of the one in Matz' email.
> 
> -- 
> Daniel
> 

Great work Daniel. I don't measure the same amount of speedup that you 
claim in your email, but there is definitely a small speedup.

I've added some further further optimizations. 
find_position_in_bitfield() now uses bit operators instead of division 
and modulo operators. This should speed things up a little more.

The attached patch is created against Ruby 1.8, but it shows what I've 
exactly changed.