Bitwise Flags abandoned? [closed]

Answer 1

Bitwise operations aren't just about conserving memory. They're really useful for writing clear code. Which would you rather see?

OpenFile("...", true, false)

or

OpenFile("...", writeonly | append)

That's kind of a nonsensical/trivial example, but you get the idea.

Answer 2

Bitfields are very useful if you have very tight memory and speed requirements, or when doing low-level hardware programming.

Unless you are doing embedded programming or something similar, you do not need them. There are far more readable, powerful, extensible mechanisms for performing the same task. For instance, Java's EnumSets.

I would expect a good programmer to know them and not use them :-p

Answer 3

"Plenty" is quite generic, we want names! ;-)

Seriously, I come from assembly language and C, and I am quite proficient with bitwise operations. But I wouldn't use them to replace, say 10 unrelated booleans in a class with binary flags in an integer... Unless, perhaps, I have millions of instances of this class!

Should I have to manipulate lot of instance of booleans, I would use some bitset class, to optimize and abstract away these arrays of bits.

Now, bit manipulation fu is almost mandatory in programming, if you want to access to components of RGB[A] values, if you want to call some APIs (even if that's just ORing a number of named flags), etc.

In short, I won't use that in every project I do, but you can't ignore how to do it (a bit like regexes...).