4 ms·

I often see people say they did "C bit twiddling". Is that just a folksier way to say C programming (as I have suspected) or does it mean something distinct?

• scarface74 7y ago
  C bit twiddling for me means a bit of inline assembly, inspecting the assembly generated by the compiler, figuring out why the files generated didn’t work across platforms (found out about the endian difference between x86 and whatever the mainframes we were also targeting), etc.
• burfog 7y ago
  There are people, not too many anymore, who write C without even remembering how to use the bitwise operators. They can't use any of: left shift, right shift, bitwise and, bitwise or, xor, complement. They may use unions or pointers, but not for any sort of aliasing. To them, byte order and struct packing are fuzzy concepts that never come in to play. Most of these programmers have moved on to Java, Javascript, and Python. Those doing "C bit twiddling" are the other C programmers. Most commonly I hear the phrase from people who are capable of this low-level programming but never liked it. People using the phrase seem to be mostly people who have moved on to languages like C++, C#, and Go. People actually doing the "C bit twiddling" seem to just say "C programming" as you have suspected. So I guess it is a way of saying "C, including the parts I don't miss" for people who could do it but never liked it.