I apologise for this topic, I shouldn’t be posting it here but I can’t seem to get an answer at http://forum.java.sun.com/.
Can somebody tell me the difference between a buffer and an array, or at least point me to some directions for information.
greetings
Buffers are a kind of fancy arrays. They keep track on how many data have u written to them etc.
Not a big difference at all, just that buffers are more confy for some tasks like netoworking…
Try googling some tutorials, or wait for a more detailed answer.
The biggest feature is that you can write different primitives at ‘native speed’ into the same memory-location.
There are some drawbacks though, because the native buffers are not always garbage-collected as they should. They live outside the heap, and therefore don’t trigger the GC like arrays. There is an explicit System.gc() in the code that mallocs - that does try to free the tiny Buffer objects representing the allocated memory - but as we all know… System.gc() is just a hint to the JVM, no guarantees, so expect some OutOfMemoryErrors that for once don’t terminate the VM…