Java Array of Objects crashes

Question

Java noob question:

Consider the following C array and initializer code:

struct {
  int x;
  int y;
} point_t;

point_t points[1000];

Easy. This gets created and memory allocated at load time.

Now consider the similar in Java:

public class point_t
{
   public int x;
   public int y;
}

point_t points[] = new point_t[1000];
// Without this loop, java will crash when you run this
for (int i=0; i<1000; i++)
{
   points[i] = new point_t;
}
points[0].x = 10;  // Crash would occur here without above loop
points[1].x = 10;

Initially my java program was crashing with a null pointer dereference. The problem was that, coming from C++, I was not aware that you have to create the 1000 point_t objects. Just a comment but this seems INSANE. Suppose the array size was 1 million or 1 billion. It would literally take seconds simply to "create" this array with empty entries at run time. In C++ it all happens at load time. I admit that you don't always know what would be in the C++ array's cells, but in embedded systems where I work, quite often the memory is auto initialized to zeros so it works.

So is there any easier, quicker, more efficient way in Java to create an array and allocate the memory when you have an array of objects? Or am I doing something wrong in the code above?

Answer 1

Since you are coming from a C++ background, this may help. In Java, when you write

point_t points[] = new point_t[1000];

This is similar to writing, in C++,

point_t* points[] = new point_t*[1000];

That is, in Java, when you create the array, you are not creating an array of point objects, but rather and array of point references, the same as if you would have created an array of point pointers in C++.

Java is a managed (garbage-collected) language; that is what Java programmers would expect.

As for the second part of your question, how one would create the objects themselves, what you did is fine. Create 1000 point objects in a loop and load them up. If you want shorter code, you can write a nice method to do this work. :)

You can also look into other collection libraries that might have these kind of convenience factory methods.