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Gotta love Microsoft. “We need this to store either a 0 or a 1. How many bits should we take up, boss?”

32.

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Bezier@suppo.fi ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Using more than one bit for true/false isn’t just a microsoft thing, and not really as ridiculous as it sounds. If you have 32 bits in one memory address, you can either:

Do it like the example here. This is pretty normal.

Use bitfields: Pack multiple values into the same address, but “waste” more memory and cpu time for keeping track and checking which bit your bool is in. This is mostly useful when the data itself has to be really small.
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MacNCheezus@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I bet the person who decided to store gender as a 32 bit value instead of a single bit is feeling utterly proud of his foresight right now.

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Technus@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It looks to be the smallest supported integer type: …microsoft.com/…/25cce700-7fcf-4bb6-a2f3-0f6d0843…

I don’t know much about the registry file format or the Windows APIs, but it’s possible that smaller data types wouldn’t save space due to alignment requirements for the datastructures.

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