What about using ByteBuffer on top of a binary blob? Doesn't that
meet your requirements for a list-like array wrapper?
I'm sure that's possible but as I understand it this would mean specifying
a type of binary rather than eg list<double>. Additional complexity in the
Java code aside, this would also infect the code of other languages we're
interfacing with.
From my point of view at least, finding a workaround with Thrift is a bit
of a moot point anyway since we already have a solution in place. I really
just wanted to chip in and point out the problem is real, and for some cases
a very significant one.
Looking at the bigger picture, I've been hoping for a long time now that
there would be some progress in supporting XOPs in the VM (see http://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/fixnums_in_the_vm
for a discussion). This would greatly reduce the overhead of many boxed primitive
operations, and would mean libraries like Thrift wouldn't generally need
to consider trading off usability with performance.
