Motivation:
There are currently many more places where this could be used which were
possibly not considered when the method was added.
If https://github.com/netty/netty/pull/8388 is included in its current
form, a number of these places could additionally make use of the same
BYTE_ARRAYS threadlocal.
There's also a couple of adjacent places where an optimistically-pooled
heap buffer is used for temp byte storage which could use the
threadlocal too in preference to allocating a temp heap bytebuf wrapper.
For example
https://github.com/netty/netty/blob/4.1/buffer/src/main/java/io/netty/buffer/ByteBufUtil.java#L1417.
Modifications:
Replace new byte[] with PlatformDependent.allocateUninitializedArray()
where appropriate; make use of ByteBufUtil.getBytes() in some places
which currently perform the equivalent logic, including avoiding copy of
backing array if possible (although would be rare).
Result:
Further potential speed-up with java9+ and appropriate compile flags.
Many of these places could be on latency-sensitive code paths.