[vbezhenar]

Why should compiler optimize obviously dumb code? If developer wants to create billions of heap objects, compiler should respect him. Optimizing dumb code is what made C++ unbearable. When you write one code and compilers generates completely different code.

[carlmr]

The problem is rather that Java doesn't have generics and structs, so you're kind of forced to box things or can't use collections.

[vbezhenar]

No, in the example they provided, programmer wrote obviously stupid code. It has nothing to do with necessity:

    Long sum = 0L;
    for (Long value : values) {
        sum += value;
    }

I also want to highlight that there are plenty of collections utilizing primitive types. They're not generic but they do the job, so if you have a bottleneck, you can solve it.

That said, TBH I think that adding autoboxing to the language was an error. It makes bad code look too innocent. Without autoboxing, this code would look like a mess and probably would have been caught earlier.

[carlmr]

>They're not generic but they do the job, so if you have a bottleneck, you can solve it.

But that's the thing, in other languages you don't need a workaround to work on primitives directly.