[tb]

I completely agree with everything you've said except for "any use of bitfields." The comma operator is ok in this circumstance, mixing unsigned and signed is a big no-no, but what have you got against bitfields? They're very useful when it comes to pulling sub-byte fields out of network packets.

[caf]

They're not any use for pulling sub-byte fields out of network packets in portable code, because everything about the precise layout of bitfields is entirely implementation-defined. Portable code has to use masking-and-shifting.

The only portable uses of bitfields are to potentially save a little memory, and to get "modulo-power-of-2" behaviour. Bitfields are a classic "not as useful as they first appear" feature.

[nitrogen]

They're very useful when it comes to pulling sub-byte fields out of network packets.

That is, if you don't mind tying your code to a particular platform and compiler. The alignment and packing of bitfields is implementation dependent: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1490092/c-c-force-bit-fie...

For what it's worth, I use bitfields on occasion, but only to save memory and get better warnings when storing range-limited values. It's nice to have the compiler warn about a comparison always being true or false due to the limited range of a type. The performance of bitfields is probably worse than just tossing all my boolean values into an int32_t or int8_t.

[tb]

Aha, thank you. As most of my C code has been written for a single compiler and a single platform I was less aware of the pitfalls than I should have been. I will know now to be extra vigilant if I ever have to port that code.