Engineering productivity investments depend on inflection points, scale, controls, data ... for only primitive types and Java objects; no way to deterministically free memory; a limited addressing ...

If all of the values fall within the range of a float, it makes sense to use the smaller Java data type in this situation, otherwise the array elements needlessly consume memory.

I don’t know anyone who likes investigating a Java heap dump. They can be massive — literally multiple gigs in size. They contain so much information that identifying the cause of a JVM memory leak ...