I have written an interpreter that requires me to perform 32-bit division of unsigned integers. In Java, I can do this as:
reg[a] = (int) ((reg[b] & 0xFFFFFFFFL) / (reg[c] & 0xFFFFFFFFL));
But I would like to avoid the conversion to long and back to int. Java already gives the unsigned right shift operator >>> for that special case, so maybe there is a clever way to do unsigned division in the same way.
Note that add and multiply work fine, since two's compliment numbers just work.
Is there a better way in Java to do this?
Well, if you shift down by one bit, you could divide the resulting two numbers, then shift up twice (because the resulting number would be 4 times smaller). But that would only work on even numbers, since you would lose the least significant bit.
I don't really think it would save you any time to check for that condition. (or check for numbers smaller then 231)