Java 8 Unsigned Int

When I recently profiled one of our applications, it turned out that a lot of memory was wasted on a huge number of long primitives. They were used to represent IDs, which were originating from a 3rd party text file. Someone must have loved huge numbers, so they chose an ID format that didn’t fit into an int.

Well, while being huge, the IDs were at least always positive. So I was confident that some data massage would allow me to squeeze them into primitive int values eventually. It took me by surprise that Java 8 actually supports unsigned primitives out of the box. Guess we all missed that while wrapping our heads around lambdas and streams, right?

Here’s how it works:

public class UnsignedIntTest {

    @Test
    public void roundTrip() {

        // compile error: 2^32 - 1 is too large for an int
        // int intValue = 4294967295;

        long longValue = (long) Math.pow(2, 32) - 1;
        String longValueAsString = String.valueOf(longValue);

        int unsignedInt = Integer.parseUnsignedInt(longValueAsString);

        long result = Integer.toUnsignedLong(unsignedInt);

        assertEquals(longValue, result);

    }

}