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

Talking heads - once in a lifetime

And you may ask yourself: where is my beautiful house? Where is my beautiful wife?

In the industrial automation world and most of the IT industry, data is aligned to the nearest word. Depending on architecture, that’s usually either 16, 32, or 64 bits. And that’s the space a single Boolean takes.