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That's right. Before LabVIEW 5, Booleans were 16 bit integers and Boolean arrays were packed into 16 bit integers too. That had however several performance penalties in several places and was anything but standard to anything else except some MacOS precedences, so was dropped in favor of a more standard implementation with bytes for each boolean. Reality is that there is no such thing as a perfect implementation for every possible use case. Your packed array solution you assumed LabVIEW to use, had severe performance limitations in LabVIEW 3 and was therefore dropped in favor of a more common way that did consume more memory when boolean arrays were involved but made conversion between boolean arrays and other formats simpler and generally more performant. But there is a simple rule: If you are concerned about this kind of performance optimization then don't use boolean arrays at all! They involve memory manager operations all over the place and those are magnitudes slower than a few hundred CPU cycles with which you can do just about any boolean operation you might ever dream up. For such performance optimization you need to look at properly sized integers and do boolean arithmetic on them. And if your "boolean array" gets over 64 bits you should definitely look at your algorithme. Most likely you have chosen the easy path of working with boolean arrays in order to not have to think about proper algorithme implementation but if you go that path, worrying about sub microseconds optimizations is definitely a lost battle already. One of the worst performance killers with the packed boolean array implementation in LabVIEW 3 was autoindexing. Suddenly a lot of register shifts and boolean masking had to be done on every autoindex terminal for a boolean array. That made such loops magnitudes slower than a simple adress increment when using byte arrays for boolean arrays.

Memory [re]allocations in diagrams are expensive and Boolean operator performance is trivial in comparison?. If you have to worry about a few nanoseconds of fundamental operations, then a general purpose desktop is not the platform to use?

I think booleans in LabVIEW are stored as bytes, not bits. All bits clear is a false and any other pattern is true. This can lead to some interesting tricks you can play when typecasting in between boolean and characters.