Universal object versus multiple varaibles

Question

Hello
im currently developing some data management system wich stores and gets varius datatypes both primitive and higher level objects.
therefor i implemented a class 'datatype' compareable with these fields:
final static int TYPE_INT=0;     
final static int TYPE_DOUBLE=1;
final static int TYPE_BOOL=2;
final static int TYPE_STRING=3;
final static int LEN_INT=4;
final static int LEN_DOUBLE=8;
final static int LEN_BOOL=1;
final static int LEN_STRING=0;
final static int MAX_STR_LEN=255;
public int type,size; //these are public for faster access. they are vital to the performance
Object value;now if i want to compare eg an int with a double in compareTo(datatype op) i have to perform massice casting and wrapper-instancing like:
case TYPE_INT:
   switch(op.type){
//not sure if this linde  is 100% correct, i just want to ilustrate the idea
    case TYPE_DOUBLE: return (int)((double)((Integer)(value).intValue())-((Double)value).doubleValue())
}so i figured it may be better to have multiple fields in the datatype object, one for each primitive datatype like:
int intVal;
double doubleVal;
String stringVal;
and only set one at a time.
anyone has an idea how memory-consuming this may be?
does defineing a primitive data without init. it does consume memory?
its highly possible to have more then a thousend datatpy objects at a time so this is important to me.

Answer 1

//these are public for faster
access. they are vital to the performance
Object value;Are you absolutely sure about the above? Offhand I'd have to say that's pretty unlikely.
so i figured it may be better to have multiple fields
in the datatype object, one for each primitive
datatype like:
int intVal;
double doubleVal;
String stringVal;
and only set one at a time.Don't take this too hard but it looks like you are programming "FecalMatter V0.1"
anyone has an idea how memory-consuming this may be?
does defineing a primitive data without init. it does
consume memory?yes.
its highly possible to have more then a thousend
datatpy objects at a time so this is important to me.And if each of these Objects took up 1K an thousand of them would be 1 whole megabyte. That's sure to crush your Commodore 64.