Unsigned Integers with Java and Kotlin 1.3
·8 mins
Something that has always been a bit of a limitation in the Java numeric type system is the lack of support for unsigned integers. It is not particularly common to have to work with unsigned types, but when it does happen, it’s usually unpleasant in some way. Libraries like Guava have provided utilities to make it cleaner, and recent updates to Java 8 also included some unsigned helper methods.
Kotlin 1.3 has an experimental feature to make unsigned types a full citizen of the type system, while still having all of the performance of primitive integer types. Let’s take a look!