It's probably tough to find a metaprogramming solution to this, for two reasons:
1. Addressing happens at the byte level, not the bit level, so a type can't begin on any bit. You'd have to do your own addressing, such as in std::bitset.
2. For now, there's no reflection in the language, so you can't really assign names to members in a general way (hello, preprocessor). A solution might be to index by type; something like the following:
I have done similar things a few times, and like JSON handling, the optimal API does not seem to be the same for every intended use. Size-focused cases want different things than speed-focused ones, and you need to deal with sign extension, etc.
Yup, I'd be very wary of all the template instantiation going on here. Sadly, I often find codegen is the most reasonable solution in a given situation. I wish we had a decent macro system, like Rust's
1. Addressing happens at the byte level, not the bit level, so a type can't begin on any bit. You'd have to do your own addressing, such as in std::bitset.
2. For now, there's no reflection in the language, so you can't really assign names to members in a general way (hello, preprocessor). A solution might be to index by type; something like the following:
struct BitA{}; struct BitB{};
using ExampleBitFields = BitFields<BitA, BitB>;
bool checkBitA(const ExampleBitFields& x) { return x[BitA{}]; }
However, this has a lot of downsides.