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, bit shifting is being used at low-level embedded software all the time. It can also be used as an almost magic trick to perform extremely fast math operations, have a look at

http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fast-inverse-square-root/