Review Request: 7088913/7088952 : Additions to primitive wrappers

[Mike Duigou]

On Sep 22 2011, at 14:34 , David Holmes wrote:

> On 22/09/2011 11:23 PM, Ulf Zibis wrote:
>> Am 22.09.2011 12:04, schrieb David Holmes:
>>> On 22/09/2011 7:40 PM, Ulf Zibis wrote:
>>>> Yep, not easy to make a right decision here.
>>>> 
>>>> One if the questions might be, if SIZE/BYTES are meant as resolution
>>>> (2**SIZE = number of distinct values) or as memory usage.
>>>> I would say: SIZE should be meant as resolution, but BYTES as memory
>>>> usage. This would add additional value to the new introduced constant.
>>>> So:
>>>> Boolean.SIZE = 1
>>>> Boolean.BYTES = 4 (8 for 64-bit build)
>>> 
>>> I can support the SIZE == resolution position.
>>> 
>>> But BYTES can't mean "memory usage" as that is totally VM dependent
>>> and also has platform dependencies, and is not a constant as such due
>>> to the way different fields can be packed together.
>> See quote from the original bug report
>> <http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7088952>:
>> "The most frequent use of the SIZE constant is to determine the storage
>> space requiresments of the type by Primitive.SIZE / Byte.SIZE"
>> 
>> So I would say, this bug is invalid.
> 
> I'm inclined to agree at the moment.
> 
> Mike: exactly what kind of "storage space requirements" were you considering?

For cases like DataOutputStream where manifest constants are currently used. The same could apply in NIO byte buffers as well as user code.

It's also useful for calculating the size of arrays of primitives (with the exception of boolean).

Mike