Understanding Bitshift Operations

This short course covers the fundamental ideas behind bitshifting and where it is used in game programming.

We will analyze the real applications of bitshifting, understand why the math works, and review a couple of examples of source code that use bitshifting.

The lectures cover:

• The math behind multiplication and division by the base in the decimal system

• The math behind multiplication and division by the base in binary

• The difference between left shift and right shift

• Bitshift operators as processor instructions

• Bitshift operators in high-level languages

• Arithmetic and logical shifts

• Examples of source code applications

• Review of relevance and applications of bitshift operations in software development

There are no hardware or programming language requirements for this course. If you program in any high-level language (C, C++, Java, Python, Rust, etc) you will be able to follow along and understand how bitshifting works. But if you want to follow along and check the example source code, you'll need a basic code editor and a compiler.