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

byte, short, char types are mostly useless, except when used in arrays to save space.

Neither Java or JVM has any real support for them. Almost all operations on them will promote them to int or long first. We cannot even write something like

short a=1, b=2;
a = a + b;  // illegal
a = a << 1; // illegal

Then why the heck even bother with defining operations on byte, short, char types at all?

All they do are sneaking in widening conversions that will surprise the programmer.