Are there any real life uses for the Java byte primitive type?

Question

For some inexplicable reason the byte primitive type is signed in Java. This mean that valid values are -128..127 instead of the usual 0..255 range representin

Answer 1

Amazingly, I just used byte in Java for the first time last week, so I do have an (albeit unusual) use-case. I was writing a native Java function, which lets you implement a function in a library that can be called by Java. Java types need to be converted to types in the native language, in this case C

The function needed to take an array of bytes, but (forgetting about the byte type entirely at the time) I had it take a char[]. The signature Java generates for the C function gives the type of that parameter as jcharArray, which can be converted to a bunch of jchars, which are typedef-ed in jni.h to unsigned short. Naturally, that is not the same size -- it's 2 bytes instead of 1. This caused all sorts of problems with the underlying code. Making the Java type byte[] resulted in a jbyteArray, and jbyte on Linux is typedef-ed to signed char, which is the right size