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Efficiency

Division-based implementations can be of particular concern because a division requires multiple cycles on nearly all processor microarchitectures. Division (modulo) by a constant can be inverted to become a multiplication by the word-size multiplicative-inverse of that constant. This can be done by the programmer, or by the compiler. Division can also be reduced directly into a series of shift-subtracts and shift-adds, though minimizing the number of such operations required is a daunting problem; the number of machine-language instructions resulting may be more than a dozen and swamp the pipeline. If the microarchitecture has hardware multiply functional units, then the multiply-by-inverse is likely a better approach.