Bit Manipulation (optional chapter)___CH_O

O.1 — Bit flags and bit manipulation via std::bitset

Modifying individual bits within an object is called bit manipulation.

Bit flags

Best practice

Bit manipulation is one of the few times when you should unambiguously use unsigned integers (or std::bitset).

Bit numbering and bit positions

Manipulating bits via std::bitset

O.2 — Bitwise operators

The bitwise operators

Best practice

To avoid surprises, use the bitwise operators with unsigned operands or std::bitset.

What!? Aren’t operator<< and operator>> used for input and output?

They sure are.
Programs today typically do not make much use of the bitwise left and right shift operators to shift bits. Rather, you tend to see the bitwise left shift operator used with std::cout (or other stream objects) to output text. Consider the following program:

#include <bitset>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    unsigned int x { 0b0100 };
    x = x << 1; // use operator<< for left shift
    std::cout << std::bitset<4>{ x } << '\n'; // use operator<< for output

    return 0;
}

This program prints:

1000

In the above program, how does operator<< know to shift bits in one case and output x in another case? The answer is that std::cout has overloaded (provided an alternate definition for) operator<< that does console output rather than bit shifting.

When the compiler sees that the left operand of operator<< is std::cout, it knows that it should call the version of operator<< that std::cout overloaded to do output. If the left operand is an integral type, then operator<< knows it should do its usual bit-shifting behavior.

The same applies for operator>>.

Bitwise XOR

The last operator is the bitwise XOR (^), also known as exclusive or.

Bitwise assignment operators

As an aside…

There is no bitwise NOT assignment operator. This is because the other bitwise operators are binary, but bitwise NOT is unary (so what would go on the right-hand side of a ~= operator?). If you want to flip all of the bits, you can use normal assignment here: x = ~x;

O.3 — Bit manipulation with bitwise operators and bit masks

Bit masks and std::bitset

std::bitset supports the full set of bitwise operators. So even though it’s easier to use the functions (test, set, reset, and flip) to modify individual bits, you can use bitwise operators and bit masks if you want.

Why would you want to? The functions only allow you to modify individual bits. The bitwise operators allow you to modify multiple bits at once.

#include <cstdint>
#include <iostream>
#include <bitset>

int main()
{
	[[maybe_unused]] constexpr std::bitset<8> mask0{ 0b0000'0001 }; // represents bit 0
	[[maybe_unused]] constexpr std::bitset<8> mask1{ 0b0000'0010 }; // represents bit 1
	[[maybe_unused]] constexpr std::bitset<8> mask2{ 0b0000'0100 }; // represents bit 2
	[[maybe_unused]] constexpr std::bitset<8> mask3{ 0b0000'1000 }; // represents bit 3
	[[maybe_unused]] constexpr std::bitset<8> mask4{ 0b0001'0000 }; // represents bit 4
	[[maybe_unused]] constexpr std::bitset<8> mask5{ 0b0010'0000 }; // represents bit 5
	[[maybe_unused]] constexpr std::bitset<8> mask6{ 0b0100'0000 }; // represents bit 6
	[[maybe_unused]] constexpr std::bitset<8> mask7{ 0b1000'0000 }; // represents bit 7

	std::bitset<8> flags{ 0b0000'0101 }; // 8 bits in size means room for 8 flags
	std::cout << "bit 1 is " << (flags.test(1) ? "on\n" : "off\n");
	std::cout << "bit 2 is " << (flags.test(2) ? "on\n" : "off\n");

	flags ^= (mask1 | mask2); // flip bits 1 and 2
	std::cout << "bit 1 is " << (flags.test(1) ? "on\n" : "off\n");
	std::cout << "bit 2 is " << (flags.test(2) ? "on\n" : "off\n");

	flags |= (mask1 | mask2); // turn bits 1 and 2 on
	std::cout << "bit 1 is " << (flags.test(1) ? "on\n" : "off\n");
	std::cout << "bit 2 is " << (flags.test(2) ? "on\n" : "off\n");

	flags &= ~(mask1 | mask2); // turn bits 1 and 2 off
	std::cout << "bit 1 is " << (flags.test(1) ? "on\n" : "off\n");
	std::cout << "bit 2 is " << (flags.test(2) ? "on\n" : "off\n");

	return 0;
}

This prints:

bit 1 is off
bit 2 is on
bit 1 is on
bit 2 is off
bit 1 is on
bit 2 is on
bit 1 is off
bit 2 is off

Making bit masks meaningful

When are bit flags most useful?

Astute readers may note that the above examples don’t actually save any memory. 8 separate booleans values would normally take 8 bytes. But the examples above (using std::uint8_t) use 9 bytes – 8 bytes to define the bit masks, and 1 byte for the flag variable!
Not only is this much more readable, it’s likely to be more performant as well, since it only involves 2 operations (one Bitwise OR and one parameter copy).

This is one of the reasons OpenGL, a well regarded 3d graphic library, opted to use bit flag parameters instead of many consecutive Boolean parameters.

Here’s a sample function call from OpenGL:

glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); // clear the color and the depth buffer

GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT and GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT are bit masks defined as follows (in gl2.h):

#define GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT               0x00000100
#define GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT             0x00000400
#define GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT               0x00004000

O.4 — Converting between binary and decimal