Maximum number of parameters in Java method declaration

Question

What is the maximum number of parameters that a method in Java can have and why?

I am using Java 1.8 on a 64-bit Windows system.

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Answer 1

Section 4.3.3 of the JVM specification has the information you are looking for:

A method descriptor is valid only if it represents method parameters with a total length of 255 or less, where that length includes the contribution for this in the case of instance or interface method invocations. The total length is calculated by summing the contributions of the individual parameters, where a parameter of type long or double contributes two units to the length and a parameter of any other type contributes one unit.

Therefore it appears that whether the host-machine is 32-bit or 64-bit has no effect on the number of parameters. If you notice, the documentation speaks in terms of "units", where the length of one "unit" is a function of the word-size. If the number of parameters directly proportional to word-size, there would be portability issues; you wouldn't be able to compile the same Java program on different architectures (assuming that at least one method used the maximum-number of parameters on the architecture with the larger word-size).