I haven't tested this myself, but from what I have heard it is not necessarily a good idea to store several different things in a single byte like this. While i

I haven't tested this myself, but from what I have heard it is not necessarily a good idea to store several different things in a single byte like this. While it may consume less memory there is a performance cost for each access since you may need to do masks and shifts. Of course, there is a non-trivial performance trade-off with more cycles but more objects fits in cache, etc. Some quick googling gave for example this source which seems to hint that under some situations it is not worth it at least https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4240974/when-is-it-worthwhile-to-use-bit-fields https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4240974/when-is-it-worth... Lastly, it seems like being quite harsh to call the code being of poor quality because of something like that. Unless it really is very important to get the extra memory, just the maintenance cost of packing things efficiently might make it not worth it. Even production code bases such as the JVM will happily use a single byte (or even more?) to store a boolean, and such things probably occur all over the place.