posted 16 years ago
as I understand it - it's not defined, and it doesn't matter. the authors of the JVM are free to make it whatever size they want or need to for whatever reason. They often choose a size that is most efficient on the specific platform their jvm will run on.
but more importantly, it doesn't matter. you can't do any byte manipulation like you would in C, so you never need to count over say seven bytes in an array...
Why is it so important that you know?
There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors