Am I the only one who thinks that there are far more efficient data structures than a bit array to represent this data ? How about an RLE encoded list of hosts

Am I the only one who thinks that there are far more efficient data structures than a bit array to represent this data ? How about an RLE encoded list of hosts, for instance ? (since they're consecutive 32-bit integers). There'd be way less data than in a bitfield which will make most of these queries far faster than iterative bitfield lookups. Also, much more of the data would fit and stay in memory, which means that all queries that iterate over it will be 10x faster or maybe more. Of course experimenting with data structures is not something you can do very efficiently in Go, as it'll be painfully verbose code. C++ would be far more useful. But this is basically the old argument for/against optimizing code. The real problem with the "old timer" programmer is that there are quick ways to break his program. When new queries present themselves, the "old timer" will quickly find his datastructures not optimized for the queries, or that they require complex calculations, which means that for data analysis the modern app developer will probably "win". When it comes to putting a product in production, it needs to be fast and cheap. Any company that doesn't hire an old-timer developer for that will quickly find their costs exploding. This may be acceptable for a few weeks when trying to find product/market fit but it won't last long.