I need a way (preferably fast) to turn very larger numbers into an array of bits. I tried sprintf and then splitting, but it looks like sprintf can't do a binary print of numbers that large (up to 1<<80) - nor am I confident that was a really "speedy" way to approach the issue. It seems like there should be some easy way to do this.

Essentially if I start with the number 57, I want to end up with the array ( 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1 ) (low bit is the first element).

Alternatively, if I just had a good way of checking the xth bit of a number without building a bitmask (unless someone can clue me in on how to do that quickly) that would work.

Speed matters to me because I've got a lot of computations to run here and if I burn too many cycles the program will end up taking an impractical amount of time (months) to run.

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