A library for implementing equals and hashCode

[Liam Miller-Cushon]

[received off-list]

There's some related discussion under "What’s the relationship to
Comparator?". There are at least four options: Equivalence extends
Comparator, Comparator extends Equivalence, there's no relationship between
them, or they both extend some new common super type. There are trade-offs
here, but none of those options seem like a slam-dunk.

The handling of subtypes also affects the choice between instanceof and
getClass() (see "Does equals use instanceof or getClass()?"), but we may
have found a way to side-step part of that debate.

On Mon, Apr 22, 2019 at 12:20 PM Fred Toussi <fredt at users.sourceforge.net>
wrote:

> Since 2014 HSQLDB has been using an ObjectComparator that extends
> Comparator for its hash sets and maps. These are sets and maps for
> combinations of int, long and Object, as well as order preserving sets and
> maps.
>
>
> https://sourceforge.net/p/hsqldb/svn/HEAD/tree/base/trunk/src/org/hsqldb/lib/ObjectComparator.java
>
> https://sourceforge.net/p/hsqldb/svn/HEAD/tree/base/trunk/src/org/hsqldb/map/BaseHashMap.java
>
> We made a shortcut to extend Comparator, but if this is going to be added
> to Java, your Equivalence<T> should be the super interface of Comparator<T>
>
> You may also consider the problems of correctly implementing equals in
> subclasses, which took years to be clarified (by Martin Odersky AFAIR) by
> calling super.equals(other) before performing the test. Example below from
> HSQLDB code.
>
>     public class RowType extends Type {
>     public boolean equals(Object other) {
>
>         if (other == this) {
>             return true;
>         }
>
>         if (other instanceof RowType) {
>             if (super.equals(other)) {
>             ....
>
> Regards
>
> Fred Toussi
> HSQLDB Project
>
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