I have multiple `Long` `Int` and `Byte` variables...

# android

[Lilly]

I have multiple Long Int and Byte variables which I use across my codebase but have to convert them to different types. Lets take a Long variable which I have to convert to int (toInt()) or byte (toByte()) at different places. Is it common to provide the same variable as Int or as Byte, e.g. myVariableAsLong, myVariableAsInt, myVariableAsByte? Does this approach make sense, is there another common approach for this case or is it pointless?

[Joshua Hansen]

I don't think it's good practice to have duplicate variables. In bigger projects this could be harder to maintain. I would say just use the functions

[Juliane Lehmann]

I mean, how would that look in practice? About like this:

object Consts {
  const val myVarAsInt = 23
  val myVarAsByte = myVarAsInt.toByte()
}

So you'd use it as

foo(myVarAsByte)

instead of

foo(myVar.asByte())

I'm not seeing the big advantage there, but if you do, nothing wrong with it. But having a single source of truth is definitely a good idea.

[Lilly]

@Joshua Hansen @Juliane Lehmann Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Improving readability wasn't my intention but rather performance. But there is no performance penalty here I guess. I'm using okio library for byte operations, unfortunately most of the functions expect Long data type.

[Juliane Lehmann]

Ah, I see, hadn't thought about the possible performance penalty. My unsubstantiated guess here would be that any possible penalty from the conversion (provided that the compiler doesn't smartly precompile it anyway, but that I do not know) would be dwarfed by the actual operations - except when you massage single bytes in a tight inner loop.

[Lilly]

true story. The operations do not happen in a loop so it's not a big deal. Thanks :)