James Gosling: idealism, the Internet and Java, Pt I

Sunday, 21 January 2018

CHEAT SHEET for java List interface, LinkedList and ArrayList

Consider Below points before choosing List concrete implementations for your use case: 

  • ArrayList is a linear data structure and  re-sizable/dynamic array
 
  • Initial size can be given. and if not given the default size is 10
 
  • It is always good practice to give initial size and advised not to give very large number as size
 
  • Good programmers prefer ArrayList to LinkedList if retrieval operations is done more frequently than insertion and deletions of elements.
 
  • Better choose LinkedList if insertion and deletion operations are done frequently compared to retrieval operations.
 
  • Lists are not sorted. if required use Collections.sort() to sort
 
  • Collections.sort() uses optimized merge sort [tim sort] on ArrayList
 
  • However legacy merge sort also can be used using a switch. But it is going to be deprecated  in near future 

  • The major difference between ArrayList and LinkedList is RandomAccess behavior 

  • ArrayLists uses Random access indexing where as LinkedLists uses
          Sequential access indexing
 
  • LinkedList carries extra overhead in the form of reference to the next and previous elements other than element's data itself

  • LinkedList uses Doubly LinkedList data structure internally

  • Deque is the java DoubleLinkedList data structure implementation

  • Before choosing List implementation ask yourself below questions 
                    a. Are you aware of initial size? 
                    b. Which operations are used more frequently? [insertion, deletion,
                       retrieval, search, sort are few among others]

  • Search Algorithm: 
                  a. Collections class uses binary search if List is ArrayList
                  b. Collections class uses linear search if List is of type LinkedList


  • ArrayList and LinkedList both uses fast fail iterations.

  • If another thread tries to modify list while iterating, java runtime throws ConcurrentModificationException. This can be considered as fast fail behavior  

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