Java : Best way to pass int by reference

Question

I have a parsing function that parses an encoded length from a byte buffer, it returns the parsed length as an int, and takes an index into the buffer as an integer arg. I

Answer 1

You can create a Reference class to wrap primitives:

public class Ref
{
    public T Value;

    public Ref(T value)
    {
        Value = value;
    }
}

Then you can create functions that take a Reference as a parameters:

public class Utils
{
    public static  void Swap(Ref t1, Ref t2)
    {
        T temp = t1.Value;
        t1.Value = t2.Value;
        t2.Value = temp;
    }
}

Usage:

Ref x = 2;
Ref y = 9;
Utils.Swap(x, y);

System.out.println("x is now equal to " + x.Value + " and y is now equal to " + y.Value";
// Will print: x is now equal to 9 and y is now equal to 2

Hope this helps.