Miniboxing and the MbArray API Semester Project

In modern programming languages, genericity allows abstracting over types, enabling programmers to develop algorithms and data structures regardless of the data being handled. This tremendeously improves productivity and code reuse. Although generics offer a uniform programming experience accross different types, the actual data comes in different sizes and shapes. For example, we can equally instantiate generic container for 1 bit boolean values, 32 bit integer values, or even object types passed by reference. To resolve the tension between the uniform types and non uniform nature of data, compilers take two different approaches: