What are the advantages and disadvantages associated with automatic conversion of primitive types to objects and vice versa?

Advantages of automatic conversion (auto-boxing and unboxing) of primitive types to objects and vice versa:

• Convenience and code readability — no need to manually create wrapper objects.
• Allows primitives to be used where objects are required (e.g., in collections).

Disadvantages:

• Potential performance overhead due to creating additional objects.
• Possibility of NullPointerException errors during unboxing if the object is null.

Example:

Integer a = 10; // auto-boxing int to Integer
int b = a;      // unboxing Integer to int

Here, the compiler automatically inserts conversions, but if a is null, an exception will occur at int b = a;.