In practice, I believe most fast hand value evaluators just use a lookup table, treating each hand as a 52 bit (or 64 with 12 wasted bits, most likely) bitset w

In practice, I believe most fast hand value evaluators just use a lookup table, treating each hand as a 52 bit (or 64 with 12 wasted bits, most likely) bitset with 5 bits set to 1 to indicate the cards.