Have you ever had to use bit shifting in real projects?
Have you ever had to use bit shifting in real programming projects? Most (if not all) high level languages have shift operators in them, but when would you actually need to use them?
Answer
I still write code for systems that do not have floating point support in hardware. In these systems you need bit-shifting for nearly all your arithmetic.
Also you need shifts to generate hashes. Polynomial arithmetic (CRC, Reed-Solomon Codes are the mainstream applications) or uses shifts as well.
However, shifts are just used because they are handy and express exactly what the writer intended. You can emulate all bit-shifts with multiplication if you want to, but that would be harder to write, less readable and sometimes slower.
The compilers detect cases where multiplication can be reduced to a shift.