My gender is a null-pointer.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Even booleans take up 8 bits. And that's a lot of wasted space.
That's only due to technical reasons on weird platforms like x86, 64bit x86 or ARM.
That's why you use bitarrays and bitflags instead when you need more than just one or two arguments for a function.
Only if it's performance sensitive. Otherwise you're wasting programmer time both writing and reading the code, and you've made it less maintainable with more complexities where bugs can creep in.
The vast majority of the time you can afford a few wasted bits.
Honestly though I don't quite understand why a compiler couldn't optimise this process. Like it knows what a boolean is, surely it could reduce them down to bits.
Well, to get a boolean out of a bit array you have to do some operations. So at first it doesn't make it more performant. Compilers probably don't automatically make them bitarrays because of that.
However, the memory savings means less cache used. And a cache miss is way more expensive than those bit operations. So they should be more performant. I'm sure someone out there has done the actual research and there's a good reason why compilers don't make all booleans bitarrays.
Clearly your gender field is a boolean. Which means it can be either true, false, null, or undefined. Except in javascript where for some reason it can sometimes be NaN, but only when you try to compare two people.
A boolean, so 8 bits of freedom to fill up
My gender is
{ toString: ()=>{String.prototype.toString = ()=>">:3"; return ":3";} }
Gender: true
gender: impl Any
Bold of programmers to assume gender can be expressed accurately in a finite discrete system. Gonna have to bust the Taylor series for some better approximation.
I guess in theory as there will only ever be a finite number of individuals, there will also necessarily only ever be a finite number of different gender expressions, so finite discrete probably works. (Not to say that peoples experiences of gender are fixed and equidistant, but more so that you could have a "gender enum" with an entry for each individual)
Of course, trying to say how many bits this would require is almost impossible because theres always going to be more people and more genders, but it is technically finite.
In any case, bagsies on (leading zeros)100101001
Me on my way to define everyone's gender:
enum Gender {
AARON,
ALEX,
ANN,
...
I will always read it as ay-ay-ron
Gender is obviously a signed byte.
Gender is a struct
struct Gender {
byte binaryBias; ///Determines male (+) or female (-) bias if present
ubyte binaryAm; ///Determines the amount of binary gender(s) present
bool isTrans; ///True if assigned at birth gender does not equal with current one
ubyte xenoAm; ///Determines the amount of xenogender
uint xenoGen; ///Xenogender selection, 0 if not applicable
Sex* sex; ///Pointer to the person's current sex
}
Now this is a gender definition I can get behind. None of that string/enum crap, just raw data.
That's a lot of implementation detail. Is there just a service interface I can inject to know what bathroom a person's RFID fob should open?
Just don't have gendered bathrooms, simple as that.