Java Reference
In-Depth Information
a primitive type and the other a
boxed
type. Primitive types are built into the language and
runtime environment as fundamental building blocks; boxed types are just normal Java
classes that wrap up the primitives.
Because Java generics are based around
erasing
a generic parameter—in other words, pre-
tending it's an instance of
Object
—only the boxed types can be used as generic arguments.
This is why if you want a list of integer values in Java it will always be
List<Integer>
and
not
List<int>
.
Unfortunately, because boxed types are objects, there is a memory overhead to them. For ex-
ample, although an
int
takes 4 bytes of memory, an
Integer
takes 16 bytes. This gets even
worse when you start to look at arrays of numbers, as each element of a primitive array is
just the size of the primitive, while each element of a boxed array is actually an in-memory
pointer to another object on the Java heap. In the worst case, this might make an
Integer[]
take up nearly six times more memory than an
int[]
of the same size.
There is also a computational overhead when converting from a primitive type to a boxed
type, called
boxing
, and vice versa, called
unboxing
. For algorithms that perform lots of nu-
merical operations, the cost of boxing and unboxing combined with the additional memory
bandwidth used by allocated boxed objects can make the code significantly slower.
As a consequence of these performance overheads, the streams library differentiates between
the primitive and boxed versions of some library functions. The
mapToLong
higher-order
int
,
long
, and
double
types have been chosen as the focus of the primitive specialization
implementation in Java 8 because the impact is most noticeable in numerical algorithms.
Figure 4-1. ToLongFunction
The primitive specializations have a very clear-cut naming convention. If the return type is a
primitive, the interface is prefixed with
To
and the primitive type, as in
ToLongFunction
(shown in
Figure 4-1
). If the argument type is a primitive type, the name prefix is just the
