FWIW, I evaluated Thrift a few years ago to use in a financial application
for shifting around large quantities of floating point numbers (many billions).
The inability for Thrift to handle lists/arrays of primitives efficiently
in Java was a showstopper in terms of performance so we ended up rolling
our own solution. I revisit this list evey now and again to see where things
stand but I'm sad to see that this issue still isn't being addressed.
I don't see why it isn't possible to create a "list-like" array wrapper for
the various primitive types instead of resort to using j.u.List with autoboxing.
Yes this does make usability slightly more awkward but the performance gains
are *huge* and, in our case at least the gains *far* outweigh the downside.
A feature like this could be made optional, with standard List<Double> code
being generated for those who'd prefer a cleaner API.
If anyone does eventually pick this up, note that preallocating arrays to
the correct size where possible (similar to how new ArrayList(100); works)
also has a noticable impact on performance.
Chris
Lists are meant to be lists for convenience. Performance would be
nice, but turning them into *Buffers would be a major usability hit. I
recommended using binary for your list<byte> because typically a list
of bytes is a byte array. The same advice is not relevant to the other
types.
