From my examination of $isbit, I'm wondering if - either the same thing causing $isbit to be slow could be the same thing causing $powmod to slow down
These are unrelated, other than the global MAPM precision setting.
The slow performance of the bigfloat btiwise operations is due to converting MAPM bigfloat into a bitfield, applying changes, and then converting back to MAPM.
As for $isbit()... that is hilarious. I was so focused on optimizing the MAPM from/to conversion to apply bitwise operations that I missed the simple one line bit test. Sheesh! The $isbit() change will be in the next beta.
