typedef struct { bool a: 1; bool b: 1; bool c: 1; bool d: 1; bool e: 1; bool f: 1; bool g: 1; bool h: 1; } __attribute__((__packed__)) not_if_you_have_enough_booleans_t;The 8-bit Intel 8051 family provides a dedicated bit-addressable memory space (addresses 20h-2Fh in internal RAM), giving 128 directly addressable bits. Used them for years. I’d imagine many microcontrollers have bit-width variables.
bit myFlag = 0;Or even return from a function:
bit isValidInput(unsigned char input) { // Returns true (1) if input is valid, false (0) otherwise return (input >= '0' && input <= '9'); }We could go the other way as well: TI’s C2000 microcontroller architecture has no way to access a single byte, let alone a bit. A Boolean is stored in 16-bits on that one.
And, you can have pointers to bits!
std::vector<bool>fits eight booleans into one byte.auto v = std::vector<bool>(8); bool* vPtr = v.data; vPtr[2] = true; // KABOOM !!!I’ve spent days tracking this bug… That’s how I learned about bool specialisation of std::vector.
boolean bloat
I first thought you wrote boolean float, not sure if that’s even worse.
boolean root beer float
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if wasting a byte or seven matters to you, then then you need to be working in a lower level language.
It’s far more often stored in a word, so 32-64 bytes, depending on the target architecture. At least in most languages.
No it isn’t. All statically typed languages I know of use a byte. Which languages store it in an entire 32 bits? That would be unnecessarily wasteful.
C, C++, C#, to name the main ones. And quite a lot of languages are compiled similarly to these.
To be clear, there’s a lot of caveats to the statement, and it depends on architecture as well, but at the end of the day, it’s rare for a
byteorboolto be mapped directly to a single byte in memory.Say, for example, you have this function…
public void Foo() { bool someFlag = false; int counter = 0; ... }The
someFlagandcountervariables are getting allocated on the stack, and (depending on architecture) that probably means each one is aligned to a 32-bit or 64-bit word boundary, since many CPUs require that for whole-word load and store instructions, or only support a stack pointer that increments in whole words. If the function were to have multiplebyteorboolvariables allocated, it might be able to pack them together, if the CPU supports single-byte load and store instructions, but the nextintvariable that follows might still need some padding space in front of it, so that it aligns on a word boundary.A very similar concept applies to most struct and object implementations. A single
byteorboolfield within a struct or object will likely result in a whole word being allocated, so that other variables and be word-aligned, or so that the whole object meets some optimal word-aligned size. But if you have multiple less-than-a-word fields, they can be packed together. C# does this, for sure, and has some mechanisms by which you can customize field packing.No, in C and C++ a bool is a byte.
since many CPUs require that for whole-word load and store instructions
All modern architectures (ARM, x86 RISC-V) support byte load/store instructions.
or only support a stack pointer that increments in whole words
IIRC the stack pointer is usually incremented in 16-byte units. That’s irrelevant though. If you store a single bool on the stack it would be 1 byte for the bool and 15 bytes of padding.
A single byte or bool field within a struct or object will likely result in a whole word being allocated, so that other variables and be word-aligned
Again, no. I think you’ve sort of heard about this subject but haven’t really understood it.
The requirement is that fields are naturally aligned (up to the machine word size). So a byte needs to be byte-aligned, 2-bytes needs to be 2-byte aligned, etc.
Padding may be inserted to achieve that but that is padding it doesn’t change the size of the actual bool, and it isn’t part of the bool.
But if you have multiple less-than-a-word fields, they can be packed together.
They will be, if it fits the alignment requirements. Create a struct with 8 bools. It will take up 8 bytes no matter what your packing setting is. They even give an example:
If you specify the default packing size, the size of the structure is 8 bytes. The two bytes occupy the first two bytes of memory, because bytes must align on one-byte boundaries.
They used
bytehere but it’s the same forboolbecause a bool is one byte.I’m really surprised how common this misconception is.
Joke’s on you, I always use 64 bit wide unsigned integers to store a 1 and compare to check for value.
So does the cpu
just like electronic components, they sell the gates by the chip with multiple gates in them because it’s cheaper
That’s a good analogy.
7 Shades of Truth
pragma(pack) {
int a:1, b:1, … h:1;
}
IIRC.
I mean is it really a waste? What’s minimum amount of bits most CPUs read in one cycle.
We need to be able to express 0 and 1 as integers so that functionality is just being overloaded to express another concept.
Wait until the person who made this meme finds out about how many bits are being wasted on modern CPU architectures. 7 is the minimum possible wasted bits but it would be 31 on every modern computer (even 64b machines since they default to 32b ints).
Wait till you realise the size of SSD sectors
…or you can be coding assembler - it’s all just bits to me
