Bit manipulation is important to know when doing data compression, cryptography and optimization.

Bitwise operations include AND, NOT, OR, XOR and bit shifts.

Go supported bit operations include:

& AND
| OR
^ XOR
&^ AND NOT
<< left-shift
>> right-shift

Go does not have a dedicated NOT operator like C++ or Python. Instead we have to use the XOR operator to toggle the bits.

 var n byte = 0x0F
 fmt.Printf("%08b\n", n)
 n = ^n
 fmt.Printf("%08b\n", n)

This is the output:

00001111
11110000

Here are some common bit manipulation algorithms that can be done in Go

• Swapping integers using XOR since XOR will result in 1 only if both bits are the same.

func swap(a, b int) (int, int) { 
 a = a ^ b 
 b = b ^ a 
 a = a ^ b 
 return a, b
}

• Toggle bits using XOR

func flip(a int) int{
 a ^= 0xFFFFFFFF
 return a
}

• Find Odd/even using AND

func isEven(n int) bool{
 if n&1 == 1 { 
  return false 
 } 
 return true
}

• Find if a number is power of 2

func isPowerofTwo(n int) bool{
 if (n & (n-1) == 0){
  return true
 }
 return false
}

Like this:

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