Given an object byte[], when we want to operate with such object often we need pieces of it. In my particular example i get byte[] from wire where first 4 bytes describe lenght of the message then another 4 bytes the type of the message (an integer that maps to concrete protobuf class) then remaining byte[] is actual content of the message... like this
length|type|content
in order to parse this message i have to pass content part to specific class which knows how to parse an instance from it... the problem is that often there are no methods provided so that you could specify from where to where parser shall read the array...
So what we end up doing is copying remaining chuks of that array, which is not effective...
As far as i know in java it is not possible to create another byte[] reference that actually refers to some original bigger byte[] array with just 2 indexes (this was approach with String that led to memory leaks)...
I wonder how do we solve situations like this? I suppose giving up on protobuf just because it does not provide some parseFrom(byte[], int, int) does not make sence... protobuf is just an example, anything could lack that api...
So does this force us to write inefficient code or there is something that can be done? (appart from adding that method)...
In Java, Array is not just section of memory - it is an object, that have some additional fields (at least - length). So you cannot link to part of array - you should: