What is the purpose of ByteBuffer's flip method? (And why is it called “flip”?)

Question

Why does ByteBuffer\'s flip() method called \"flip\"? What is \"flipped\" here? According to apidoc, two successive flips won\'t restore original state, and multiple flips w

Answer 1

ByteBuffer is ill designed. There are lots of complaints from decent programmers.

So don't try to reason about it, just study and use the API carefully.

Now I cannot badmouth it without presenting an alternative, so here it is:

A buffer has a fixed capacity; it maintains 2 pointers: start and end. get() returns the byte at the start position and increments start. put() puts the byte at the end position and increments end. No flip()!