My understanding is that this has nothing to do with performance.
Certain classes, such as String, as declared final for security reasons.
In the case of Integer I would suggest using composition. It's not as
nice but it'll work.
Gili
Nick Radov wrote:
Is it still necessary for the core Java classes such as
java.lang.Integer to be declared final? I understand that may have been
necessary in the early days for performance reasons, but modern JVMs no
longer provide much of a performance benefit for final classes. For
certain applications it would really be helpful to be able to subclass
some of those core classes.
For example, one application I'm working on deals with integer values
that must be between 0 and 9999 inclusive. I would like to be able to
create a custom Integer subclass which enforces that limit in the
constructor, but currently that isn't possible. While I could create a
new class that acts as a wrapper around Integer, the syntax would be
much more awkward and that would also make it much more difficult to
interface with other third-party classes.
*Nick Radov | Research and Development Manager | Axolotl Corp*
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