Why does Java mask shift operands with 0x1F?

Question

In Java:

(0xFFFFFFFF <<  1) = 0xFFFFFFFE = 0b1111111111111110
                :         :               :
(0xFFFFFFFF << 30) = 0xE0000000 = 0b111         


        

Answer 1

Sure, there is: it's how most processors (specifically including x86) implement bit shifting, and to do what you want -- to check if the shift is greater than 32, and if so, return zero -- requires a branch, which can be expensive on modern CPUs. It's not just "annoying," it can slow things down by orders of magnitude.

In short, doing what you want would add significant overhead to an operation that is expected to be blazing fast by high-performance code.

For reference, the logic isn't exactly the same as %, it's a mask. See JLS 15.19 for details:

If the promoted type of the left-hand operand is int, only the five lowest-order bits of the right-hand operand are used as the shift distance. It is as if the right-hand operand were subjected to a bitwise logical AND operator & (§15.22.1) with the mask value 0x1f (0b11111). The shift distance actually used is therefore always in the range 0 to 31, inclusive.