Hey, cool blog post!
It's definitely staying in my bookmarks.
I can't help but feel, though, that your mask only makes sense when there are few columns. The problem with the bitwise mask is that the requirement for power of two numbers presents a relatively low ceiling in respect to the quantity of columns it can efficiently encode. It seems to me that the most space efficient way of encoding the mask for large numbers of columns is just an n-bit binary blob. Am I missing something?
Hey, cool blog post! It's definitely staying in my bookmarks.
I can't help but feel, though, that your mask only makes sense when there are few columns. The problem with the bitwise mask is that the requirement for power of two numbers presents a relatively low ceiling in respect to the quantity of columns it can efficiently encode. It seems to me that the most space efficient way of encoding the mask for large numbers of columns is just an n-bit binary blob. Am I missing something?