A List implementation backed by multiple small arrays rather than the traditional single large array.

[Kevin L. Stern]

I put together the following class, ChunkedArrayList, in response to
Martin's request (excerpted from an earlier conversation on this web board)
below.

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6brz3MPBDdhMGNiNGIwMTQtMTgxMi00ODlmLTk4ZGYtOWY2NDE0M2E5M2Zl&sort=name&layout=list&num=50

Thoughts?

Regards,

Kevin


On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com>
wrote:

    It surely is not a good idea to use a single backing array
    for huge arrays.  As you point out, it's up to 32GB
    for just one object.  But the core JDK
    doesn't offer a suitable alternative for users who need very
    large collections.

    It would have been more in the spirit of Java to have a
    collection class instead of ArrayList that was not fastest at
    any particular operation, but had excellent asymptotic behaviour,
    based on backing arrays containing backing arrays.
    But:
    - no such excellent class has been written yet
     (or please point me to such a class)
    - even if it were, such a best-of-breed-general-purpose
     List implementation would probably need to be introduced as a
     separate class, because of the performance expectations of
     existing implementations.

    In the meantime, we have to maintain what we got,
    and that includes living with arrays and classes that wrap them.

    Changing the spec is unlikely to succeed..

    Martin
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