Divide a number by 3 without using *, /, +, -, % operators
C, 167503724710

Here's my solution to the problem. I admit it is unlikely to win a strict code golf competition, but it doesn't use any tricks to indirectly call built-in division functionality, it is written in portable C (as the original Stack Overflow question asked for), it works perfectly for negative numbers, and the code is exceptionally clear and explicit.

My program is the output of the following script:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys

# 71
sys.stdout.write('''#include &lt;stdint.h&gt;
#include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
int32_t div_by_3(int32_t input){''')

# 39 * 2**32
for i in range(-2**31, 2**31):
    # 18 + 11 + 10 = 39
    sys.stdout.write('if(input==%11d)return%10d;' % (i, i / 3))

# 95
sys.stdout.write(r'''return 7;}int main(int c,char**v){int32_t n=atoi(a[1]);printf("%d / 3 = %d\n",n, div_by_3(n));}''')


Character count: 71 + 39 * 2**32 + 95 = 167503724710

Benchmarks

It was asked how long this would take and how much memory it would use, so here are some benchmarks:


Script execution time — Running ./test.py | pv --buffer-size=1M --average-rate &gt; /dev/null for about 30 seconds gives a rate of about 14.8 MB/s. The rate of output can reasonably be assumed to be roughly constant, so the running time to completion should be about 167503724710 B / (14.8 * 1048576 B/s) ≈ 10794 s.
Compilation time — The TCC compiler claims to compile C code at 29.6 MB/s, which makes for a compilation time of 167503724710 B / (29.6 * 1048576 B/s) ≈ 5397 s. (Of course this can run in a pipeline with the script.)
Size of compiled code — I tried estimating it using ./test.py | tcc -c - -o /dev/stdout | pv --buffer-size=1M --average-rate &gt; /dev/null, but it seems tcc doesn't output anything until it reads the entire source file in.
Memory usage to run — Since the algorithm is linear (and tcc doesn't optimize across lines), the memory overhead should be only a few kilobytes (apart from the code itself, of course).