Bitwise equality

Question

I need to perform a bitwise equality between two bytes. That means that for instance if I have two bytes: 00011011 and 00011110 the result is 11111010 The only fast way I see is to use the following statement

byte a, b;//set input bytes
byte c = ~(a^b);//output bytes

But I wonder if there is a faster solution for this. After these equality operation I want to mask the bits I need. So I need to use an AND-operation. So the code becomes:

byte a, b;//set input bytes
byte m;//mask, intresting bits are set to 1, others to 0
byte c = (~(a^b))&m;//output bytes

aren't there any faster and more simple methods that don't need to use all those bitwise operations because this part of the code will be called very often.

Answer 1

I doubt it can be done in fewer operations. That looks optimal. Perhaps you could store ~(a^b) in a lookup table (256*256 entries)? I doubt you would get much benefit and possibly even make things worse, but you could try it.