It is just very finicky, with myriad edge cases easy to get wrong, and even easi...

jstimpfle · on April 27, 2022

Extracting a subrange of bits and shifting them to the beginning is not exactly rocket science.

ncmncm · on April 27, 2022

Experience indicates otherwise.

If you must use bit fields, make them unsigned. Bugs love to hide under signed bit fields.

jstimpfle · on April 27, 2022

That makes sense, looking at how signed arithmetic works on different architectures it would feel strange to use signed bitfields.

Unsigned bitfields are a nice way to get modular arithmetic with n bits without syntactic clutter.

ncmncm · on April 27, 2022

"Unsigned bitfields are a nice ..."

Appear to be. Are, when all the stars align. Are not in fact, often enough that you are issued a red warning you may ignore if you are insulated from all consequences.