this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Weird how I usually learn more from the humor communities than the serious ones... ๐
std::vector<bool> fits eight booleans into one byte.
std::vector<std::vector> is how I stored the representation of a play field for a Tetris game I made once.
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It's far more often stored in a word, so 32-64 bytes, depending on the target architecture. At least in most languages.
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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 7 bits....
Pay attention. ๐คช
7 bytes! Look at Mr. Moneybags here!
Well when it comes to bytes, you could say I'm a bit of a millionaire myself.
Jokeโs on you, I always use 64 bit wide unsigned integers to store a 1 and compare to check for value.
So does the cpu
I have a solution with a bit fields. Now your bool is 1 byte :
struct Flags {
bool flag0 : 1;
bool flag1 : 1;
bool flag2 : 1;
bool flag3 : 1;
bool flag4 : 1;
bool flag5 : 1;
bool flag6 : 1;
bool flag7 : 1;
};
Or for example:
struct Flags {
bool flag0 : 1;
bool flag1 : 1:
int x_cord : 3;
int y_cord : 3;
};
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boolean bloat
I first thought you wrote boolean float, not sure if that's even worse.
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just like electronic components, they sell the gates by the chip with multiple gates in them because it's cheaper
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Are you telling me that no compiler optimizes this? Why?
It would be slower to read the value if you had to also do bitwise operations to get the value.
But you can also define your own bitfield types to store booleans packed together if you really need to. I would much rather that than have the compiler do it automatically for me.
Well there are containers that store booleans in single bits (e.g. std::vector<bool> - which was famously a big mistake).
But in the general case you don't want that because it would be slower.
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This reminds me that I actually once made a class to store bools packed in uint8 array to save bytes.
Had forgotten that. I think i have to update the list of top 10 dumbest things i ever did.
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).