Regarding section 4.1 and 8 in this paper, it uses several software implementations of MSB and gives a performance comparison between the VList and RAOTS from w

Regarding section 4.1 and 8 in this paper, it uses several software implementations of MSB and gives a performance comparison between the VList and RAOTS from which it was derived. It doesn't utilize hardware instructions which can improve the MSB calculation and eliminate branches (eg, clz/lzcnt or bsr). It's worth having another look at RAOTS using an optimized MSB which will leverage instructions available in modern hardware, and see how its performance compares to the VList. https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~imunro/cs840/ResizableArrays.pdf https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~imunro/cs840/ResizableArrays.pdf