[GIRAPH-938] Allow fast working with primitives generically

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Component/s: lib
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Igor Kabiljo
• Created: 07/Aug/14 02:47
• Updated: 17/Sep/14 23:21
• Resolved: 17/Sep/14 23:21

Description

Currently, there are generic classes that handle any types, but are slow and take a lot of memory. So there are a lot of primitive specific classes, that just copy the same code, with different types.
That means both huge code duplication (which makes it easy to have bugs, and have versions out of sync), and there are always usecases with types that are not covered - and so fallback to very inefficient version.

It is extremely expensive to use wrapped classes for making things work generically - Integer, Long, etc.
But using IntWritable, LongWritable, etc isn't, because they are mutable, and we can have one reused object, which can be used as data transfer.