That's why I primarily use booleans in return parameters, beyond that I'll try to use bitfields. My game engine's tilemap format uses a 32 bit struct, with 16 bit selecting the tile, 12 bit selecting the palette, and 4 bit used for various bitflags (horizontal and vertical mirroring, X-Y axis invert, and priority bit).

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 30 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 7 points 6 days ago

Good rant.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago

I always use stdint.h so that my types are compatible across any mcu. And it makes the data type easily known instead of guessing an i t size

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Undefined Behavior…?

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

Ok, I recalled wrong, it was unspecified

[–] jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 0 points 5 days ago

Or you could just use Rust