Anything that you can do with bitwise operators, you can also do with general calculations, with the advantage of general calculations that they can do much more than bitwise operators. So what is the use of bitwise operators?

Bitwise operations are incredibly fast. Much, much faster than regular calculations. So should you use them when making calculations, when it is opportune to do so? The answer is no, for two reasons:

• Python is already smart enough to recognize that some calculations can be executed using bitwise operators, so it will make the conversion for you.

• If you really want a fast program, you should not use Python at all.

Another use that is often mentioned, is that they facilitate storing boolean values in a small storage space. For instance, if I have eight booleans that I want to store, I can use a tuple of eight booleans, which amounts to at least eight bytes of space, or encode all eight of them in one byte using bitwise operators. However, in today’s computers space is of little concern, so only if you are talking about huge, huge data collections you might get worried about space.

So what is the use of bitwise operators then? They are actually of fairly little use, unless you have to create programs that need to work “close to the machine.” Occasionally you have to deal with data structures that are most naturally handled using bitwise operators. They may also help when you need to manipulate the content of binary files.

To give an example: colors are usually encoded as three bytes, for the red, green, and blue channel. A color number is thus a three-byte number. Bitwise operators are a natural way to distinguish the separate color channels from a color number. Here is a function that does that:

def getRGB( color ):
    blue = color & 255
    green = (color >> 8) & 255
    red = (color >> 16) & 255
    return red, green, blue
    
r, g, b = getRGB( 223567 )
print( "red={}, green={}, blue={}".format( r, g, b ) )

For someone who knows about color encoding, such a function reads well.