Is there a big.BitCount?

Question 1

I put one together myself - note that this does not take into account the sign of the number. This returns the bit count of the the raw bytes behind the big.Int.

// How many bits?
func BitCount(n big.Int) int {
    var count int = 0
    for _, b := range n.Bytes() {
        count += int(bitCounts[b])
    }
    return count
}

// The bit counts for each byte value (0 - 255).
var bitCounts = []int8{
    // Generated by Java BitCount of all values from 0 to 255
    0, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 3, 
    1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4, 
    1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5,  
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    4, 5, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6, 7, 
    1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    4, 5, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6, 7, 
    2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    4, 5, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6, 7, 
    3, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 6, 
    4, 5, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6, 7, 
    4, 5, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6, 7, 
    5, 6, 6, 7, 6, 7, 7, 8,
}

Question 2

As already mentioned, for quick efficient raw access to the underlying bits of a big.Int you want to use big.Bits. Also, quicker than either an 8 bit lookup table or a simple loop is to use one of well know 64 bit methods of counting bits (aka Hamming weight). Even faster, you could use an assembly implementation of popcount that uses a native CPU instruction¹.

Without using assembly, or catering to special cases where it's known there are few bits set, this is likely one of the faster/fastest Go implementations (it could be made faster on 32 bit machines by using uint32 and adjusting the popcount function accordingly):

func BitCount(n *big.Int) int {
    count := 0
    for _, v := range n.Bits() {
        count += popcount(uint64(v))
    }
    return count
}

// Straight and simple C to Go translation from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_weight
func popcount(x uint64) int {
    const (
        m1  = 0x5555555555555555 //binary: 0101...
        m2  = 0x3333333333333333 //binary: 00110011..
        m4  = 0x0f0f0f0f0f0f0f0f //binary:  4 zeros,  4 ones ...
        h01 = 0x0101010101010101 //the sum of 256 to the power of 0,1,2,3...
    )
    x -= (x >> 1) & m1             //put count of each 2 bits into those 2 bits
    x = (x & m2) + ((x >> 2) & m2) //put count of each 4 bits into those 4 bits
    x = (x + (x >> 4)) & m4        //put count of each 8 bits into those 8 bits
    return int((x * h01) >> 56)    //returns left 8 bits of x + (x<<8) + (x<<16) + (x<<24) + ...
}

Benchmarks and comparisons of this and other implementations presented here is available in full on GitHub gist.

¹ Such as the one added in Go1.9; the updated gist shows it is ~3× faster than the previous best I had.

Question 3

You can use now (as of Go 1.9) the math/bits library that implements some useful functions that deal with bit-related computations. Concretely, you can iterate through the result of big.Int.Bits and call the bits.OnesCount function.

Here is an example:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "math/big"
    "math/bits"
)

func BitCount(z *big.Int) int {
    var count int
    for _, x := range z.Bits() {
        count += bits.OnesCount(uint(x))
    }
    return count
}

func PrintBinary(z *big.Int) {
    for _, x := range z.Bits() {
        fmt.Printf("%064b\n", x)
    }
}

func main() {
    a := big.NewInt(1 << 60 - 1)
    b := big.NewInt(1 << 61 - 1)
    c := big.NewInt(0)
    c = c.Mul(a, b)

    fmt.Println("Value in binary format:")
    PrintBinary(c)
    fmt.Println("BitCount:", BitCount(c))
}

Question 4

FYI, the following solution is simpler and faster than the original solution provided here:

func BitCountFast(z *big.Int) int {
    var count int
    for _, x := range z.Bits() {
            for x != 0 {
                    x &= x-1
                    count++
            }
    }
    return count
}

It outperforms the original solution by 5x on my machine:

BenchmarkBitCountFast-4 100000000           19.5 ns/op         0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkBitCountOrig-4 20000000            96.1 ns/op        16 B/op          1 allocs/op