Might be that I'm totally wrong, but I think that as long as you're trying to consider

1. Incrementing haystack by 1-bit.

an important primary op, there's something wrong.

I'd basically try to first find out how the needle would need to be shifted in order to match the char_aligned haystack, and leave the haystack as it is - always.

My somewhat naive approach would be to start with building the set of 256 possible 'needle heads' (going for char operations all over). A 'needle head' could be say 8 chars long (or some other convenient value).

Then, look for the occurences of the needle_heads within haystack. For each needle_head, you know the offset (needed shift) associated with it. (Yes, that means 256 searches instead of 1, but it still might be better than shift-ing things around for every next bit-position.)

If needlehead is found, go on with a full, char-wise compare, with haystack's chars untouched and every next needle-char obtained via a proper shift from the next two chars of the needle.

End of string is bit-masked as needed to comply with the known offset.

Maybe you've tried something like that already?

Krambambuli
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