This question already has answers here:
What does 'unsigned temp:3' in a struct or union mean? [duplicate]
(4 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
Recently I stumbled upon a code written like this:
typedef struct
{
uint8_t TC0_WG0 :2;
uint8_t TC0_CS :3;
} Timer0;
What I wanted to know is what does the part that says :2; & :3; specifically mean? Is it accessing the bits 0, 1, 2 only or 0, 1, 2 & 3 only of the 8-bit unsigned character or what ?
These are basically bitfields explicitly telling that the TC0_CS would be in 3 bit.
These can be used to save space. In embedded system, I have faced this use when designing an interrupt system. Used bitfield to specify the specific positions as a way to activate deactivate interrupts.
He is not accessing the 0,1 or 2nd bits but OP can using appropriate bit masking.
It is called bit-field members.
cppreference say's :
Bit fields
Declares a member with explicit width, in bits. Adjacent bit field
members may be packed to share and straddle the individual bytes.
A bit field declaration is a struct or union member declaration which
uses the following declarator:
identifier(optional) : width
identifier - the name of the bit field that is being declared. The name is optional: nameless bitfields introduce the specified number of
bits of padding
width - an integer constant expression with a value greater or equal to zero and less or equal the number of bits in the underlying
type. When greater than zero, this is the number of bits that this bit
field will occupy. The value zero is only allowed for nameless
bitfields and has special meaning: it specifies that the next bit
field in the class definition will begin at an allocation unit's
boundary.
This question already has answers here:
Is it possible to create a data type of length one bit in C
(8 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I can typedef char to CHAR1 which is 8 bits.
But how can I make 3 bit variable as datatype?
You might want to do something similar to the following:
struct
{
.
.
.
unsigned int fieldof3bits : 3;
.
.
.
} newdatatypename;
In this case, the fieldof3bits takes up 3 bits in the structure (based upon how you define everything else, the size of structure might vary though).
This usage is something called a bit field.
From Wikipedia:
A bit field is a term used in computer programming to store multiple, logical, neighboring bits, where each of the sets of bits, and single bits can be addressed. A bit field is most commonly used to represent integral types of known, fixed bit-width.
It seems you're asking for bitfields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_field
Just be aware that for some cases it's can be safer just use char or unsigned char instead of bits (compiler specific, physical memory layout etc.)
Happy coding!
typedef struct {
int a:3;
}hello;
It is only possible when it is inside structure else it is not
On the question 'why do we need to use bit-fields?', searching on Google I found that bit fields are used for flags.
Now I am curious,
Is it the only way bit-fields are used practically?
Do we need to use bit fields to save space?
A way of defining bit field from the book:
struct {
unsigned int is_keyword : 1;
unsigned int is_extern : 1;
unsigned int is_static : 1;
} flags;
Why do we use int?
How much space is occupied?
I am confused why we are using int, but not short or something smaller than an int.
As I understand only 1 bit is occupied in memory, but not the whole unsigned int value. Is it correct?
A quite good resource is Bit Fields in C.
The basic reason is to reduce the used size. For example, if you write:
struct {
unsigned int is_keyword;
unsigned int is_extern;
unsigned int is_static;
} flags;
You will use at least 3 * sizeof(unsigned int) or 12 bytes to represent three small flags, that should only need three bits.
So if you write:
struct {
unsigned int is_keyword : 1;
unsigned int is_extern : 1;
unsigned int is_static : 1;
} flags;
This uses up the same space as one unsigned int, so 4 bytes. You can throw 32 one-bit fields into the struct before it needs more space.
This is sort of equivalent to the classical home brew bit field:
#define IS_KEYWORD 0x01
#define IS_EXTERN 0x02
#define IS_STATIC 0x04
unsigned int flags;
But the bit field syntax is cleaner. Compare:
if (flags.is_keyword)
against:
if (flags & IS_KEYWORD)
And it is obviously less error-prone.
Now I am curious, [are flags] the only way bitfields are used practically?
No, flags are not the only way bitfields are used. They can also be used to store values larger than one bit, although flags are more common. For instance:
typedef enum {
NORTH = 0,
EAST = 1,
SOUTH = 2,
WEST = 3
} directionValues;
struct {
unsigned int alice_dir : 2;
unsigned int bob_dir : 2;
} directions;
Do we need to use bitfields to save space?
Bitfields do save space. They also allow an easier way to set values that aren't byte-aligned. Rather than bit-shifting and using bitwise operations, we can use the same syntax as setting fields in a struct. This improves readability. With a bitfield, you could write
directions.alice_dir = WEST;
directions.bob_dir = SOUTH;
However, to store multiple independent values in the space of one int (or other type) without bitfields, you would need to write something like:
#define ALICE_OFFSET 0
#define BOB_OFFSET 2
directions &= ~(3<<ALICE_OFFSET); // clear Alice's bits
directions |= WEST<<ALICE_OFFSET; // set Alice's bits to WEST
directions &= ~(3<<BOB_OFFSET); // clear Bob's bits
directions |= SOUTH<<BOB_OFFSET; // set Bob's bits to SOUTH
The improved readability of bitfields is arguably more important than saving a few bytes here and there.
Why do we use int? How much space is occupied?
The space of an entire int is occupied. We use int because in many cases, it doesn't really matter. If, for a single value, you use 4 bytes instead of 1 or 2, your user probably won't notice. For some platforms, size does matter more, and you can use other data types which take up less space (char, short, uint8_t, etc.).
As I understand only 1 bit is occupied in memory, but not the whole unsigned int value. Is it correct?
No, that is not correct. The entire unsigned int will exist, even if you're only using 8 of its bits.
Another place where bitfields are common are hardware registers. If you have a 32 bit register where each bit has a certain meaning, you can elegantly describe it with a bitfield.
Such a bitfield is inherently platform-specific. Portability does not matter in this case.
We use bit fields mostly (though not exclusively) for flag structures - bytes or words (or possibly larger things) in which we try to pack tiny (often 2-state) pieces of (often related) information.
In these scenarios, bit fields are used because they correctly model the problem we're solving: what we're dealing with is not really an 8-bit (or 16-bit or 24-bit or 32-bit) number, but rather a collection of 8 (or 16 or 24 or 32) related, but distinct pieces of information.
The problems we solve using bit fields are problems where "packing" the information tightly has measurable benefits and/or "unpacking" the information doesn't have a penalty. For example, if you're exposing 1 byte through 8 pins and the bits from each pin go through their own bus that's already printed on the board so that it leads exactly where it's supposed to, then a bit field is ideal. The benefit in "packing" the data is that it can be sent in one go (which is useful if the frequency of the bus is limited and our operation relies on frequency of its execution), and the penalty of "unpacking" the data is non-existent (or existent but worth it).
On the other hand, we don't use bit fields for booleans in other cases like normal program flow control, because of the way computer architectures usually work. Most common CPUs don't like fetching one bit from memory - they like to fetch bytes or integers. They also don't like to process bits - their instructions often operate on larger things like integers, words, memory addresses, etc.
So, when you try to operate on bits, it's up to you or the compiler (depending on what language you're writing in) to write out additional operations that perform bit masking and strip the structure of everything but the information you actually want to operate on. If there are no benefits in "packing" the information (and in most cases, there aren't), then using bit fields for booleans would only introduce overhead and noise in your code.
To answer the original question »When to use bit-fields in C?« … according to the book "Write Portable Code" by Brian Hook (ISBN 1-59327-056-9, I read the German edition ISBN 3-937514-19-8) and to personal experience:
Never use the bitfield idiom of the C language, but do it by yourself.
A lot of implementation details are compiler-specific, especially in combination with unions and things are not guaranteed over different compilers and different endianness. If there's only a tiny chance your code has to be portable and will be compiled for different architectures and/or with different compilers, don't use it.
We had this case when porting code from a little-endian microcontroller with some proprietary compiler to another big-endian microcontroller with GCC, and it was not fun. :-/
This is how I have used flags (host byte order ;-) ) since then:
# define SOME_FLAG (1 << 0)
# define SOME_OTHER_FLAG (1 << 1)
# define AND_ANOTHER_FLAG (1 << 2)
/* test flag */
if ( someint & SOME_FLAG ) {
/* do this */
}
/* set flag */
someint |= SOME_FLAG;
/* clear flag */
someint &= ~SOME_FLAG;
No need for a union with the int type and some bitfield struct then. If you read lots of embedded code those test, set, and clear patterns will become common, and you spot them easily in your code.
Why do we need to use bit-fields?
When you want to store some data which can be stored in less than one byte, those kind of data can be coupled in a structure using bit fields.
In the embedded word, when one 32 bit world of any register has different meaning for different word then you can also use bit fields to make them more readable.
I found that bit fields are used for flags. Now I am curious, is it the only way bit-fields are used practically?
No, this not the only way. You can use it in other ways too.
Do we need to use bit fields to save space?
Yes.
As I understand only 1 bit is occupied in memory, but not the whole unsigned int value. Is it correct?
No. Memory only can be occupied in multiple of bytes.
Bit fields can be used for saving memory space (but using bit fields for this purpose is rare). It is used where there is a memory constraint, e.g., while programming in embedded systems.
But this should be used only if extremely required because we cannot have the address of a bit field, so address operator & cannot be used with them.
A good usage would be to implement a chunk to translate to—and from—Base64 or any unaligned data structure.
struct {
unsigned int e1:6;
unsigned int e2:6;
unsigned int e3:6;
unsigned int e4:6;
} base64enc; // I don't know if declaring a 4-byte array will have the same effect.
struct {
unsigned char d1;
unsigned char d2;
unsigned char d3;
} base64dec;
union base64chunk {
struct base64enc enc;
struct base64dec dec;
};
base64chunk b64c;
// You can assign three characters to b64c.enc, and get four 0-63 codes from b64dec instantly.
This example is a bit naive, since Base64 must also consider null-termination (i.e. a string which has not a length l so that l % 3 is 0). But works as a sample of accessing unaligned data structures.
Another example: Using this feature to break a TCP packet header into its components (or other network protocol packet header you want to discuss), although it is a more advanced and less end-user example. In general: this is useful regarding PC internals, SO, drivers, an encoding systems.
Another example: analyzing a float number.
struct _FP32 {
unsigned int sign:1;
unsigned int exponent:8;
unsigned int mantissa:23;
}
union FP32_t {
_FP32 parts;
float number;
}
(Disclaimer: Don't know the file name / type name where this is applied, but in C this is declared in a header; Don't know how can this be done for 64-bit floating-point numbers since the mantissa must have 52 bits and—in a 32 bit target—ints have 32 bits).
Conclusion: As the concept and these examples show, this is a rarely used feature because it's mostly for internal purposes, and not for day-by-day software.
To answer the parts of the question no one else answered:
Ints, not Shorts
The reason to use ints rather than shorts, etc. is that in most cases no space will be saved by doing so.
Modern computers have a 32 or 64 bit architecture and that 32 or 64 bits will be needed even if you use a smaller storage type such as a short.
The smaller types are only useful for saving memory if you can pack them together (for example a short array may use less memory than an int array as the shorts can be packed together tighter in the array). For most cases, when using bitfields, this is not the case.
Other uses
Bitfields are most commonly used for flags, but there are other things they are used for. For example, one way to represent a chess board used in a lot of chess algorithms is to use a 64 bit integer to represent the board (8*8 pixels) and set flags in that integer to give the position of all the white pawns. Another integer shows all the black pawns, etc.
You can use them to expand the number of unsigned types that wrap. Ordinary you would have only powers of 8,16,32,64... , but you can have every power with bit-fields.
struct a
{
unsigned int b : 3 ;
} ;
struct a w = { 0 } ;
while( 1 )
{
printf("%u\n" , w.b++ ) ;
getchar() ;
}
To utilize the memory space, we can use bit fields.
As far as I know, in real-world programming, if we require, we can use Booleans instead of declaring it as integers and then making bit field.
If they are also values we use often, not only do we save space, we can also gain performance since we do not need to pollute the caches.
However, caching is also the danger in using bit fields since concurrent reads and writes to different bits will cause a data race and updates to completely separate bits might overwrite new values with old values...
Bitfields are much more compact and that is an advantage.
But don't forget packed structures are slower than normal structures. They are also more difficult to construct since the programmer must define the number of bits to use for each field. This is a disadvantage.
Why do we use int? How much space is occupied?
One answer to this question that I haven't seen mentioned in any of the other answers, is that the C standard guarantees support for int. Specifically:
A bit-field shall have a type that is a qualified or unqualified version of _Bool, signed int, unsigned int, or some other implementation defined type.
It is common for compilers to allow additional bit-field types, but not required. If you're really concerned about portability, int is the best choice.
Nowadays, microcontrollers (MCUs) have peripherals, such as I/O ports, ADCs, DACs, onboard the chip along with the processor.
Before MCUs became available with the needed peripherals, we would access some of our hardware by connecting to the buffered address and data buses of the microprocessor. A pointer would be set to the memory address of the device and if the device saw its address along with the R/W signal and maybe a chip select, it would be accessed.
Oftentimes we would want to access individual or small groups of bits on the device.
In our project, we used this to extract a page table entry and page directory entry from a given memory address:
union VADDRESS {
struct {
ULONG64 BlockOffset : 16;
ULONG64 PteIndex : 14;
ULONG64 PdeIndex : 14;
ULONG64 ReservedMBZ : (64 - (16 + 14 + 14));
};
ULONG64 AsULONG64;
};
Now suppose, we have an address:
union VADDRESS tempAddress;
tempAddress.AsULONG64 = 0x1234567887654321;
Now we can access PTE and PDE from this address:
cout << tempAddress.PteIndex;
I have some code here that uses bitsets to store many 1 bit values into a char.
Basically
struct BITS_8 {
char _1:1;
(...)
char _8:1;
}
Now i was trying to pass one of these bits as a parameter into a function
void func(char bit){
if(bit){
// do something
}else{
// do something else
}
}
// and the call was
struct BITS_8 bits;
// all bits were set to 0 before
bits._7 = 1;
bits._8 = 0;
func(bits._8);
The solution was to single the bit out when calling the function:
func(bits._8 & 0x80);
But i kept going into //do something because other bits were set. I was wondering if this is the correct behaviour or if my compiler is broken. The compiler is an embedded compiler that produces code for freescale ASICs.
EDIT: 2 mistakes: the passing of the parameter and that bits._8 should have been 0 or else the error would make no sense.
Clarification
I am interested in what the standard has to say about the assignment
struct X{
unsigned int k:6;
unsigned int y:1;
unsigned int z:1;
}
X x;
x.k = 0;
x.y = 1;
x.z = 0;
char t = X.y;
Should now t contain 1 or b00000010?
I don't think you can set a 1-bit char to 1. That one bit is left to determine whether it's signed or not, so you end up with the difference between 0 and -1.
What you want is an unsigned char, to hide this signing bit. Then you can just use 1s and 0s.
Over the years I've grown a bit suspicious when it comes to these specific compilers, quite often their interpretation of what could be described the finer points of the C standard isn't great. In those cases a more pragmatic approach can help you to avoid insanity, and to get the job done. What this means in this case is that, if the compiler isn't behaving rationally (which you could define as behaving totally different from what gcc does), you help it a bit.
For example you could modify func to become:
void func(char bit){
if(bit & 1){ // mask off everything that's none of its business
// do something
}else{
// do something else
}
}
And wrt your addon question: t should contain 1. It can't contain 10 binary because the variable is only 1 bit wide.
Some reading material from the last publicly available draft for C99
Paragraph 6.7.2.1
4 A bit-field shall have a type that is a qualified or unqualified
version of _Bool, signed int, unsigned int, or some other
implementation-defined type.
(which to me means that the compiler should at least handle your second example correctly) and
9 A bit-field is interpreted as a signed or unsigned integer type
consisting of the specified number of bits.107) If the value 0 or 1 is
stored into a nonzero-width bit-field of type
_Bool, the value of the bit-field shall compare equal to the value stored.
As your compiler is meant for embedded use, where bitfields are a rather important feature, I'd expect their implementation to be correct - if they claim to have bitfields implemented.
I can see why you might want to use char to store flags if Bool is typedef'd to an unsigned int or similar or if your compiler does not support packed enums. You can set up some "flags" using macros (I named them for their place values below, but it makes more sense to name them what they mean) If 8 flags is not enough, this can be extended to other types up to sizeof(type)*8 flags.
/* if you cannot use a packed enum, you can try these macros
* in combination with bit operations on the "flags"
* example printf output is: 1,1,6,4,1
* hopefully the example doesn't make it more confusing
* if so see fvu's example */
#include <stdio.h> /* for printf */
#define ONE ((char) 1)
#define TWO (((char) 1)<<1)
#define FOUR (((char) 1)<<2)
#define EIGHT (((char) 1)<<3)
#define SIXTEEN (((char) 1)<<4)
#define THIRTYTWO (((char) 1)<<5)
#define SIXTYFOUR (((char) 1)<<6)
#define ONETWENTYEIGHT (((char) 1)<<7)
int main(void){
printf("%d,%d,%d,%d,%d\n",ONE & ONE, ONE | ONE, TWO | 6, FOUR & 6, sizeof(ONE));
}
Ok, it was a compiler bug. I wrote the people that produce the compiler and they confirmed it. It only happens if you have a bitfield with an inline function.
Their recommended solution is (if i don't want to wait for a patch)
func((char)bits._8));
The other answers are right about the correct behaviour. Still i'm marking this one as the answer as it is the answer to my problem.
I was reading this link
http://dec.bournemouth.ac.uk/staff/awatson/micro/articles/9907feat2.htm
I could not understand this following statements from the link, Please help me understand about this.
The programmer just writes some macros that shift or mask the
appropriate bits to get what is desired. However, if the data involves
longer binary encoded records, the C API runs into a problem. I have,
over the years, seen many lengthy, complex binary records described
with the short or long integer bit-field definition facilities. C
limits these bit fields to subfields of integer-defined variables,
which implies two limitations: first of all, that bit fields may be no
wider, in bits, than the underlying variable; and secondly, that no
bit field should overlap the underlying variable boundaries. Complex
records are usually composed of several contiguous long integers
populated with bit-subfield definitions.
ANSI-compliant compilers are free to impose these size and alignment
restrictions and to specify, in an implementation-dependent but
predictable way, how bit fields are packed into the underlying machine
word structure. Structure memory alignment often isn’t portable, but
bit field memory is even less so.
What i have understood from these statements is that the macros can be used to mask the bits to left or right shift. But i had this doubt in my mind why do they use macros? - I thought by defining it in macros the portability can be established irrespective of 16-bit or 32-bit OS..Is it true?I could not understand the two disadvantages mentioned in the above statement.1.bit fields may be no wider 2.no bit field should overlap the underlying variable boundaries
and the line,
Complex records are usually composed of several contiguous long integers
populated with bit-subfield definitions.
1.bit fields may be no wider
Let's say you want a bitfield that is 200 bits long.
struct my_struct {
int my_field:200; /* Illegal! No integer type has 200 bits --> compile error!
} v;
2.no bit field should overlap the underlying variable boundaries
Let's say you want two 30 bit bitfields and that the compiler uses a 32 bit integer as the underlying variable.
struct my_struct {
unsigned int my_field1:30;
unsigned int my_field2:30; /* Without padding this field will overlap a 32-bit boundary */
} v;
Ususally, the compiler will add padding automatically, generating a struct with the following layout:
struct my_struct {
unsigned int my_field1:30;
:2 /* padding added by the compiler */
unsigned int my_field2:30; /* Without padding this field will overlap a 32-bit boundary */
:2 /* padding added by the compiler */
} v;