Re: thrift to Java mapping question: "list" mappingto"List" (measured results)

[Chris Miller <ch...@hotmail.com>]

> What about using ByteBuffer on top of a binary blob?  Doesn't that
> meet your requirements for a list-like array wrapper?

I'm sure that's possible but as I understand it this would mean specifying 
a type of binary rather than eg list<double>. Additional complexity in the 
Java code aside, this would also infect the code of other languages we're 
interfacing with.

>From my point of view at least, finding a workaround with Thrift is a bit 
of a moot point anyway since we already have a solution in place. I really 
just wanted to chip in and point out the problem is real, and for some cases 
a very significant one.

Looking at the bigger picture, I've been hoping for a long time now that 
there would be some progress in supporting XOPs in the VM (see http://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/fixnums_in_the_vm 
for a discussion). This would greatly reduce the overhead of many boxed primitive 
operations, and would mean libraries like Thrift wouldn't generally need 
to consider trading off usability with performance.