Have you ever had to use bit shifting in real projects?

Question

Have you ever had to use bit shifting in real programming projects? Most (if not all) high level languages have shift operators in them, but when would you actually need to

Answer 1

Yes, I've used them a lot of times. Bit twiddling is important on embedded hardware where bit-masks are very common. It's also important in games programming, when you need every last bit of performance.

Edit: Also, I use them a lot for manipulating bitmaps, for example changing the colour depth, or converting RGB <-> BGR.