internal-representation

What’s the size cost of Java inheritance?

April 29, 2023 by Tarik

When in doubt, look at the source (well, a source; each JVM is free to choose how to do it, as the standard does not mandate any internal representation). So I had a look, and found the following comment within the implementation of JDK 7-u60’s hotspot JVM: // A Klass is the part of the … Read more

Why prefer two’s complement over sign-and-magnitude for signed numbers?

October 10, 2022 by Tarik

It’s done so that addition doesn’t need to have any special logic for dealing with negative numbers. Check out the article on Wikipedia. Say you have two numbers, 2 and -1. In your “intuitive” way of representing numbers, they would be 0010 and 1001, respectively (I’m sticking to 4 bits for size). In the two’s … Read more