Autoboxing and unboxing are features introduced in Java SE 5 that allow automatic conversion between primitive types and their corresponding wrapper classes.
This saves the effort of manually converting between primitives and objects, making code more concise and readable. However, autoboxing and unboxing come with implications on performance and memory usage that developers should understand.
This article explains what autoboxing and unboxing are, why wrapper classes exist, their effect on memory, and best practices for using them effectively.
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Understanding Wrapper Classes
Why Wrapper Classes?
Wrapper classes in Java serve several purposes:
- Object Representation: There is an object requirement in many Java collections and utilities. Because they only work with objects. Hence we convert primitive data types into objects. For that, we use wrapper…