Anyone using short and byte primitive types, in real apps?

Question

I have been programming in Java since 2004, mostly enterprise and web applications. But I have never used short or byte, other than a toy program just to know

Answer 1

The primary usage I've seen for them is while processing data with an unknown structure or even no real structure. Network programming is an example of the former (whoever is sending the data knows what it means but you might not), something like image compression of 256-color (or grayscale) images is an example of the latter.

Off the top of my head grep comes to mind as another use, as does any sort of file copy. (Sure, the OS will do it--but sometimes that's not good enough.)