I don't think the change had any effect on memory consumption: because of alignment, padding is inserted either way to fill the flags to four (32-bit) or eight bytes. So with the bit field, there were 7 bytes of padding on 64-bit systems, and now there are only 6 bytes of padding.

Yes, Visual C also supports the same extension. See the "Microsoft specific" section in

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yszfawxh(v=vs.80).aspx