Comment by titzer

You might want to have a look at the unboxing and packing annotations that are proposed for Virgil. The unboxing mechanism is implemented and there was a prototype of the packing mechanism implemented by Bradley for his thesis. I am working on making a more robust implementation that I can land.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11094

I'm not sure I understand your example; if I am looking at it right, it has overlapping bitfields.

But supposing you didn't want overlapping fields, you could write:

    type Dang(tom: u11, baz: u16, bar: u5, foo: u5) #packed;

And the compiler would smash the bits together (highest order bits first).

If you wanted more control, you can specify where every bit of every field goes using a bit pattern:

    type Dang(tom: u11, baz: u16, bar: u5, foo: u5) #packed 0bTTTTTTTT_TTTbbbbb_bbbbbbbb_bbbzzzzz_????fffff

Where each of T, b, z, and r represent a bit of each respective field.