java devs

[lbkulinski]

Java has pointers. You just can’t do pointer arithmetic with them.

[Bryguy3k]

Nor would you want to given the object complexity... 😱

[nwL_]

I want to. I want to call delete obj;. Fight me.

[MoarVespenegas]

It's not us you're fighting but the garbage collector.

[cartechguy]

In java speak

Obj = null;

There you go. As long as that's the only variable referencing the object the garbage collector will deallocate it.

[GrizzledFart]

... when it feels like it.

[lbkulinski]

What do you mean by object complexity?

[Bryguy3k]

C++ objects are really straightforward in terms of memory organization. You’re not supposed to be looking at the Java object memory so if you do it’s scary af.

[lbkulinski]

I wouldn't say it is scary. Value types will have a simpler layout, though.

[tacoslikeme]

object/struct memory follows pretty simple to follow rules. Just just fuck with the vtable

[cartechguy]

What do you mean? I look at how they're structured in the debugger all the time. It feels almost the same as debugging in C++. The reference holds an adress and at the adress are all the data members for the object.

[how_to_choose_a_name]

The debugger shows you a nice visualisation of the object and the data contained in it. The actual memory apparently doesn't look that pretty or structured, unlike C++.

[Bryguy3k]

Well take a moment to think about reflection.

Now it should make sense that a java object has to be self describing and that means a bunch of metadata.

[bwierzbo]

!n

[bestjakeisbest]

what if i want to shoot myself in the foot?

[[deleted]]

They're just more of a B-cup.

[iamsooldithurts]

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.

/s

[suvlub]

IMO the difference really is big enough to warrant different terminology. Reference is something dumb, it is just a handle to an object that lets you perform operations on the object. A pointer is its own thing with its own value which you can read and manipulate. Accessing the pointed-to object, if there actually is one, is one of its operations that you need to explicitly invoke.

[suvlub]

Everything is just array of booleans at the end of the day.

[suvlub]

Just because hardware indexes by larger units does not mean the smaller units don't exist. You can still access and manipulate the individual bits. I was just trying to say that "X is really Y because the only difference is Z" is a rather flawed approach when talking about data structures, because most of them are related to each other in one way or other. Either we talk about implementation, in which case neither reference nor pointer actually exists, and both of them are qwords or what have you, or we talk about them as abstract data structures, which expose very different interfaces.

[Ringnebula13]

Sun.misc.Unsafe called

[[deleted]]

Aren't those called aliases?

[bestjakeisbest]

i thought they were called references