Bit fields are a necessity in low level networking too.
They’re incredibly useful, I wish more people made use of them.
I remember I interned at a startup programming microcontrollers once and created a few bitfields to deal with something. Then the lead engineer went ahead and changed them to masked ints. Because. The most aggravating thing is that an int size isn’t consistent across platforms, so if they were ever to change platforms to a different word length, they’d be fucked as their code was full of platform specific shenanigans like that.
Yeah. I once had to do stuff to code that had bit-fields like that and after a while, realised (by means of StackOverflow) that that part is UB and I had to go with bitwise operations instead.
Bit fields are a necessity in low level networking too.
They’re incredibly useful, I wish more people made use of them.
I remember I interned at a startup programming microcontrollers once and created a few bitfields to deal with something. Then the lead engineer went ahead and changed them to masked ints. Because. The most aggravating thing is that an int size isn’t consistent across platforms, so if they were ever to change platforms to a different word length, they’d be fucked as their code was full of platform specific shenanigans like that.
/rant
Good rant.
Yeah. I once had to do stuff to code that had bit-fields like that and after a while, realised (by means of StackOverflow) that that part is UB and I had to go with bitwise operations instead.
Undefined Behavior…?
Ok, I recalled wrong, it was unspecified