Josef “Jeff” Sipek

This is the first of hopefully many posts related to interesting pieces of code I’ve stumbled across in the dovecot repository.

Back in 1999, C99 added the bool type. This is old news. The thing I’ve never seen before is what amounts to:

struct foo {
	bool	a:1;
	bool	b:1;
};

Sure, I’ve seen bitfields before—just never with booleans. Since this is C, the obvious thing happens here. The compiler packs the two bool bits into a single byte. In other words, sizeof(struct foo) is 1 (instead of 2 had we not used bitfields).

The compiler emits pretty compact code as well. For example, suppose we have this simple function:

void set(struct foo *x)
{
	x->b = true;
}

We compile it and disassemble:

$ gcc -c -O2 -Wall -m64 test.c
$ dis -F set test.o
disassembly for test.o

set()
    set:     80 0f 02           orb    $0x2,(%rdi)
    set+0x3: c3                 ret

Had we used non-bitfield booleans, the resulting code would be:

set()
    set:     c6 47 01 01        movb   $0x1,0x1(%rdi)
    set+0x4: c3                 ret

There’s not much of a difference in these simple examples, but in more complicated structures with many boolean flags the structure size difference may be significant.

Of course, the usual caveats about bitfields apply (e.g., the machine’s endian matters).