Hacker News Reader

Using bitfields, in particular, is a heavy sacrifice in clarity for relatively few wins.

Only to those who don't understand bitfields, which IMHO means they don't even understand the basics of how a computer works, let alone how to effectively program one. JS is a high level language, but it still has bitwise operators for a reason.

View on HN

I disagree. Bitfields of somewhat unrelated fields is a sacrifice in clarity even if you understand bitfields perfectly well -- I'd argue anything requiring boilerplate sacrifices something in the way of being able to understand a code base.

I disagree. Bitfields mean that you have to do a lot of boilerplate operations which obscure the actual meaning of what you're doing, and can confuse even those who know what's going on, as an error can creep in easily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com