[PATCH] enhancement proposal for String concatenation

[Remi Forax]

Hi,
adding StringChain send the wrong message IMO, we already have StringBuffer, StringBuilder and StringJoiner,
let's try not to add another way to concatenate a variable number of Strings in Java.

I wonder if you can not achieve what you want by specializing String.join() and StringJoiner if the delimiter is an empty String ?

Rémi

----- Mail original -----
> De: "Сергей Цыпанов" <sergei.tsypanov at yandex.ru>
> À: "core-libs-dev" <core-libs-dev at openjdk.java.net>
> Envoyé: Vendredi 8 Mars 2019 20:22:10
> Objet: [PATCH] enhancement proposal for String concatenation

> Hello,
> 
> I have an enhancement proposal for some cases of String concatenation in Java.
> 
> Currently we concat Strings mostly using java.lang.StringBuilder. The main
> disadvantage of StringBuilder is underlying char array or rather a need to
> resize it when the capacity is about to exceed array length and subsequent
> copying of array content into newly allocated array.
> 
> One alternative solution existing is StringJoiner. Before JDK 9 it was a kind of
> decorator over StringBuilder, but later it was reworked in order to store
> appended Strings into String[] and overall capacity accumulated into int field.
> This makes it possible to allocate char[] only once and of exact size in
> toString() method reducing allocation cost.
> 
> My proposal is to copy-paste the code of StringJoinder into newly created class
> java.util.StringChain, drop the code responsible for delimiter, prefix and
> suffix and use it instead of StringBuilder in common StringBuilder::append
> concatenation pattern.
> 
> Possible use-cases for proposed code are:
> - plain String concatenation
> - String::chain (new methods)
> - Stream.collect(Collectors.joining())
> - StringConcatFactory
> 
> We can create new methods String.chain(Iterable<CharSequence>) and
> String.chain(CharSequence...) which allow to encapsulate boilerplate code like
> 
> 
>  StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
>  for (CharSequence cs : charSequences) {
>    sb.append(cs);
>  }
>  String result = sb.toString():
> 
> 
> into one line:
> 
> 
>  String result = String.chain(charSequences);
> 
> 
> 
> As of performance I've done some measurements using JMH on my work machine
> (Intel i7-7700) for both Latin and non-Latin Strings of different size and
> count.
> Here are the results:
> 
> https://github.com/stsypanov/string-chain/blob/master/results/StringBuilderVsStringChainBenchmark.txt
> 
> There is a few corner cases (e.g. 1000 Strings of length 1 appended) when
> StringBuilder takes over StringChain constructed with default capacity of 8,
> but StringChain constructed with exact added Strings count almost always wins,
> especially when dealing with non-Latin chars (Russian in my case).
> 
> I've also created a separate repo on GitHub with benchmarks:
> 
> https://github.com/stsypanov/string-chain
> 
> Key feature here is ability to allocate String array of exact size is cases we
> know added elements count.
> Thus I think that if the change will be accepted we can add also an overloaded
> method String.chain(Collection<CharSequence>) as Collection::size allows to
> contruct StringChain of exact size.
> 
> Patch is attached.
> 
> Kind regards,
> Sergei Tsypanov