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

[Kevin L. Stern]

Please ignore the lack of custom serialization, I'll certainly tidy up the
code if there is interest in it.

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 6:55 AM, Kevin L. Stern <kevin.l.stern at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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