Question

What is the advantage of using >> operator over / operator? It was extensively used in the code I am maintaining.
For eg,
int width = previousWidth >> 2;

Answer 1

When you want to shift a value by a certain number of bits, it’s considerably simpler to understand. For example:

byte[] bits = new byte[4];
bits[0] = (byte) (value >> 24);
bits[1] = (byte) (value >> 16);
bits[2] = (byte) (value >> 8);
bits[3] = (byte) (value >> 0);

That’s clearly shifting by different numbers of bits. Would you really want to express that in terms of division instead?

Now of course when what you really want is division, you should use the division operator for the sake of readability. Some people may use bitshifting for the sake of performance, but as ever, readability is more important than micro-optimization for most code. So in your case, if what’s actually desired is for width to be previousWidth divided by 4, the code should *absolutely reflect that:

int width = previousWidth / 4;

I’d only use bitshifting for this after proving that the performance difference was significant.