[dahart]

> Are there binary tricks worth knowing about to quickly calculate reciprocals?

Yes! You can calculate an approximate reciprocal with a single subtraction and some type-casting or bit manipulation.

The accuracy isn’t great (relative error of up to ~5%), but it might be good enough for many applications. The method is famous for being used to normalize 3d vectors in Quake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

This same method for calculating 1/x^2 can also be used to calculate 1/x by using a different magic constant and skipping the shift-right by one bit.