This is kind of an abuse of c/c++ bitfields. Arguably you don't gain much by using them as opposed to a memory chunk and simple accessors. Bitfields are a way

This is kind of an abuse of c/c++ bitfields. Arguably you don't gain much by using them as opposed to a memory chunk and simple accessors. Bitfields are a way to get an explicit memory layout, but using them subverts word alignments, word sizes, etc... Is there any reason you didn't just pre-process the values and use a huffman coding on them?