Question

How are primitive types treated differently than reference types in Java?

Answer 1

There are two types of variables in java

primitive (int,float, etc)
reference (class,interface etc)

the main difference between primitive and reference types is primitive type has always a value
and can never be null but reference type can be null.

if you dont assign a value to primitive type it will 0 but reference variable by default has null
if you try to access it it will throw a null pointer exception

assignment operator working on primitive and reference type

primitve values are created in the stack while reference values are created in heap.