Is there some reasonably fast code out there which can help me quickly search a large bitmap (a few megabytes) for runs of contiguous zero or one bits?
By "reasonably fast" I mean something that can take advantage of the machine word size and compare entire words at once, instead of doing bit-by-bit analysis which is horrifically slow (such as one does with vector<bool>).
It's very useful for e.g. searching the bitmap of a volume for free space (for defragmentation, etc.).