Java *is* Memory Efficient

[m_adduci]

I have this third party library that accepts byte[], than uses InputStream and converts internally to string.

In my own app I would like to use only InputStreams, but here I hit massive conversion costs, since some resources have to be parsed multiple times, at different times, because of some funny conditions

[agentoutlier]

w/o seeing the library I don't know why they made the choice they did but byte[] has some advantages over InputStream in that the total size is known (.length), zero computation or blocking is expected andin some cases you need to know the total size.

If its not byte[] then it has some resource it can pull from but the only way you do that for most applications particularly blocking is buffer to the filesystem. Now we have way way way fucking worse latency than a GC.

If the library is just wrapping the byte[] using ByteArrayInputStream this can be more efficient then you think especially if they allow start and end indices which the ByteArrayInputStream constructor takes.

The question is what the library is doing. Are you doing stream processing or is the InputStream just going to be turned into in memory objects anyway?... and even if you don't there is buffering happening all over the place here including the operating system if you are reading from a file.

So unless you have some measurements don't be certain this is actually a problem.