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

I have used shorts and bytes in Java apps communicating to custom usb or serial micro-controllers to receive 10bit values wrapped in 2 bytes as shorts.

Answer 2

The Java language itself makes it unreasonably difficult to use the byte or short types. Whenever you perform any operation on a byte or short value, Java promotes it to an int first, and the result of the operation is returned as an int. Also, they're signed, and there are no unsigned equivalents, which is another frequent source of frustration.

So you end up using byte a lot because it's still the basic building block of all things cyber, but the short type might as well not exist.

Answer 3

Until today I haven't notice how seldom I use them.

I've use byte for network related stuff, but most of the times they were for my own tools/learning. In work projects these things are handled by frameworks ( JSP for instance )

Short? almost never.

Long? Neither.

My preferred integer literals are always int, for loops, counters, etc.

When data comes from another place ( a database for instance ) I use the proper type, but for literals I use always int.

Answer 4

I use byte a lot. Usually in the form of byte arrays or ByteBuffer, for network communications of binary data.

I rarely use float or double, and I don't think I've ever used short.

Answer 5

I have used bytes when saving State while doing model checking. In that application the space savings are worth the extra work. Otherwise I never use them.

Answer 6

I use bytes in lots of different places, mostly involving low-level data processing. Unfortunately, the designers of the Java language made bytes signed. I can't think of any situation in which having negative byte values has been useful. Having a 0-255 range would have been much more helpful.

I don't think I've ever used shorts in any proper code. I also never use floats (if I need floating point values, I always use double).

I agree with Tom. Ideally, in high-level languages we shouldn't be concerned with the underlying machine representations. We should be able to define our own ranges or use arbitrary precision numbers.