Additional method on Stream

[Kasper Nielsen]

A couple of blog posts with the same issue.

http://winterbe.com/posts/2015/03/05/fixing-java-8-stream-gotchas-with-intellij-idea/
http://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2015/03/06/adding-tolist-to-java-streams/
http://javarevisited.blogspot.dk/2015/03/5-ways-to-convert-java-8-stream-to-list.html

It is also on the top 10 questions on stackoverflow on Java 8
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java-8

- Kasper



On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 10:22 AM, Kasper Nielsen <kasperni at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 9:16 AM, Paul Sandoz <paul.sandoz at oracle.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Apr 27, 2015, at 10:34 PM, Kasper Nielsen <kasperni at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > The other default function I would like to see is stream.toList() (I can
>> > live with collectToList) which is short for
>> s.collect(Collectors.toList()).
>> > 50 % of my terminal functions are s.collect(Collectors.toList()).
>>
>> Can you live with a static import and:
>>
>>   s.collect(toList())
>>
>> ? which is rather close to "collectToList".
>>
>> When designing j.u,s.Stream we made a conscious decision to not bind it
>> to j.u collection types. A Stream could be integrated with other forms of
>> collections (e.g. GS Collections).
>>
>
> First, if you are using any kind of modern IDE you have some kind of
> intelligent completion which will suggest collectToList the moment you
> press the 'c' in stream.c...
> The other one you have to create an additional import, and invoke a static
> method (Yes I know most IDEs makes this easy as well)
> But we are still talking about something like 1 second vs 5 seconds.
>
> Second, s.collect(toList()) is just not naturally for most users. Sure
> readers on this list understands how the collect method works. But I don't
> think many novice/intermediate users will.
>
> Third, Yes there are a lot of different collections that a stream can be
> integrated with. But we are talking about roughly 50 % of the usage.
>
> Fourth, this hasn't actually anything to do with ease of use but
> performance. But I have a very fast stream implementation where I would
> like to provide a fast (and easy) way to return the stream elements as a
> list. This is mainly in situations where I know the number of elements in
> the result (which is quite often if you don't use filters). By having a
> toList() method I can implement, I can avoid the array list resizings in
> s.collect(toList()).
> This is actually also why I would prefer if it was called toList() and not
> collectToList() as I think it is implementation detail how the list
> generation is done.
>
> - Kasper
>