With storage and bandwidth being easily available, compressing data for general use is less of a concern today than it was 20 years ago. However neither is free or unlimited, and with large scale applications a few bits can get multiplied over a few million connections; similarly, we may be talking to a client living on a smart toaster which doesn’t have much in the way of storage space. In both situations, reducing the size of the data we are storing or sending may be technically necessary, and save on operational costs.
One way to do this is to use bit operations to reduce a state to a single number. This is nothing new; anyone who has ever used flags knows how it works. The catch is that you cannot crunch detailed information in this way; it only works for boolean values. Even so, depending on the structure of your data you should be able to leverage it rather easily.
For these examples we’ll use JavaScript; however the concepts apply to any language. Continue reading “Playing with bit masks”