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Asked: 2026-05-26T06:39:35+00:00

I have a speed question for Java. I am making a chess program, and

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I have a speed question for Java. I am making a chess program, and I want to check if is a good idea to use one int as a variable to store four int variables, in which the values range from 1 to 4 bits.

The problem is that I’ll often have to extract and put in new parts of the variable, so that will cost quite some bitwise operations.

Code: 

int fromX = 4, fromY = 5, toX = 6, toY = 7;
int move = 0
move |= toY;
move = move << 4;
move |= toX;
move = move << 4;
move |= fromY;
move = move << 4;
move |= fromX;

doWork(move);

or

int fromX = 4, fromY = 5, toX = 6, toY = 7;
doWork(fromX, fromY, toX, toY);

doWork() will do a lot of different things with the coordinates, mostly extract them from the ‘int’, or just use the variables.

Which should I use?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I want to check if is a good idea to use one ‘unsigned int’ as a variable to store four ‘int’ variables

    No, this is a Bad Idea™ for a bunch of reasons.

    1. This would be highly inefficient

    2. Very hard to read

    3. (consequently) very hard to debug

    Sure, it may save a few bytes here and there, but honestly, I buy my RAM-modules in gigabytes these days.

    My suggestion:

    Write up your entire chess-program. If you run into performance problems, profile the program to see where the bottle-necks are, and do something about those. (I can guarantee you that you won’t start packing several numbers into an int once you reach this point.)

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