Maybe this should go in the Java forum, but it's also a performance question, so what the heck. Anyway, the System.arraycopy method takes two arrays of Objects, and is supposed to be faster than manually looping over the entries - presumably due to being implemented in low-level C with pointer arithmetic, or something. Now, what if I want to copy an array of primitives, like integers? The compiler doesn't complain, although an int is not an Object. Is there some implicit conversion going on, and if so, does it slow things down? Or does the underlying C just treat pointers, and is agnostic about whether they're pointers to primitives or Objects? I know that this will make absolutely zero difference to the overall performance of the program, short of copying 100k arrays every update cycle; I'm just curious.

While an int is not an object, an array of ints is, that's why arraycopy can take any array as argument.

Internally, an array is just a continuos length of bytes in memory with some extra information attached to it such as length etc. So, a System.arraycopy is (probably) pretty much equivalent to a memcpy in C, and therefore it won't make a difference speedwise what's inside the array in question.

Trap, System.arrayCopy does not merely switch references, it copies part of one array to another. Javadoc for System.arraycopy