Bit field width restriction to 32 bits

According to the PGI user guide, there is a restriction on the width of bitfields in structures to 32 bits. I am porting a code that frequently uses fields wider than this with a container class of ‘long’ or ‘long long’ to achieve a potential width of 64 bits. This is an important performance/storage issue for this code. I’m curious why this restriction is present as it does not appear in other compilers I’m familiar with.

Cheers,
Chris

Hi Chris,

The other compilers have added a language extension to allow for ‘wide’ bit-fields. While we are considering adding this extension in a future release, we currently only use the ANSI C standard definition which states that bit-fields must be an int or bool.

Thanks,
Mat