Q: Why do people use explicit masks and bit-twiddling code so much, instead of declaring bit-fields?
A: Bit-fields are thought to be nonportable, although they are no less portable than other parts of the language. (You don't know how big they can be, but that's equally true for values of type int. You don't know by default whether they're signed, but that's equally true of type char. You don't know whether they're laid out from left to right or right to left in memory, but that's equally true of the bytes of all types, and only matters if you're trying to conform to externally-imposed storage layouts, which is always nonportable; see also questions 2.12 and 20.5.)
Bit-fields are inconvenient when you also want to be able to manipulate some collection of bits as a whole (perhaps to copy a set of flags). You can't have arrays of bit-fields; see also question 20.8. Many programmers suspect that the compiler won't generate good code for bit-fields (historically, this was sometimes true).
Straightforward code using bit-fields is certainly clearer than the equivalent explicit masking instructions; it's too bad that bit-fields can't be used more often.
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