Java: Why are wrapper classes needed?

Question

On the very high level, I know that we need to "wrap" the priminitve data types, such as int and char, by using their respective wrapper classes to use them within Java collections. I would like to understand how Java collections work at the low level by asking: "why do we need to wrap primitive data types as objects to be able to use them in collections?" I thank you in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Because Java collections can only store Object References (so you need to box primitives to store them in collections).

Read this short article on Autoboxing for more info.

If you want the nitty gritty details, it pretty much boils down to the following:

Local Primitives are stored on the Stack. Collections store their values via a reference to an Object's memory location in the Heap. To get that reference for a local primitive, you have to box (take the value on the Stack and wrap it for storage on the Heap) the value.

Answer 2

Primitive data types can't be referenced as memory addresses. That's why we need wrappers which serve as placeholders for primitive values. These values then can be mutated and accessed, reorganized, sorted or randomized.

Answer 3

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1949122/boxing-and-unboxing-when-does-it-come-up

It's for C#, but the same concept apply to Java. And John Skeet wrote the answer.

Answer 4

Well, the reason is because Java collections doesn't differentiate between primitive and Object. It processes them all as Object and therefore, it will need a wrapper. You can easily build your own collection class that doesn't need wrapper, but at the end, you will have to build one for each type char, int, float, double, etc multiply by the types of the collections (Set, Map, List, + their implementation).

Can you imagine how boring that is?

And the fact is, the performance it brings by using no wrapper is almost negligible for most applications. Yet if you need very high performance, some libraries for primitive collections are also available (e.g. http://joda-primitives.sourceforge.net/index.html)

Answer 5

To store the primitive type values in collection classes we require Wrapper classe.

Answer 6

At the virtual machine level, it's because primitive types are represented very differently in memory compared to reference types like java.lang.Object and its derived types. Primitive int in Java for example is just 4 bytes in memory, whereas an Object takes up at minimum 8 bytes by itself, plus another 4 bytes for referencing it. Such design is a simple reflection of the fact that CPUs can treat primitive types much more efficiently.

So one answer to your question "why wrapper types are needed" is because of performance improvement that it enables.

But for programmers, such distinction adds some undesirable cognitive overhead (e.g., can't use int and float in collections.) In fact, it's quite possible to do a language design by hiding that distinction --- many scripting languages do this, and CLR does that. Starting 1.5, Java does that, too. This is achieved by letting the compiler silently insert necessary conversion between primitive representation and Object representation (which is commonly referred to as boxing/unboxing.)

So another answer to your question is, "no, we don't need it", because the compiler does that automatically for you, and to certain extent you can forget what's going on behind the scene.