The scary thing about bitfields is also that in the context where they make the most sense to use, writing bits to CPU registers, they are also the easiest to m

The scary thing about bitfields is also that in the context where they make the most sense to use, writing bits to CPU registers, they are also the easiest to misuse as writing one bitfield requires both reading and writing the whole byte(minimum addressable unit), which can have unexpected effects when writing to registers. On some chips, reading registers can have different values than writing so the value you are writing the second time might cancel out what you wrote the first time, or that each write triggers something you only wanted to trigger once. myregister.tx_baudrate_bitfield = 1; // Writes the whole myregister myregister.tx_now_bitfield = 1; // Reads the whole myregister, then bitmasks and finally writes. The same mistake can of course be done with manual masking also but then it's more obvious that you are reading the registers also. When the code looks like above it's very easy to not realize that it also requires a read.