StreamBuilder is awesome

[Ali Lahijani]

It would be nice to have a way to hint the StreamBuilder implementation
about splitting points. One such way is a split() method in StreamBuilder.
One would call builder.split() to hint that the next call
to builder.accept() should create a new split.


On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com>wrote:

> Yes, the precipitating cause was to mitigate the pain of taking away
> FlatMapper, but as you point out, it has other uses too.
>
> Note that you could always use ArrayList as a stream builder, so its not
> like this is something you couldn't do at all before.  But it should be
> more efficient, since it requires fewer object creations and doesn't have
> to copy elements every time you overflow a buffer.
>
> The streams that are built still retain reasonable parallelism.  The
> internal representation is an array of increasing-size arrays, so the
> spliterator first splits the "spine" array and then can split into the
> individual arrays.
>
> We're still twiddling with the API to try to ensure that it can be done
> with minimum overhead for flatMap-like usages (after all, if we didn't care
> about overhead, we'd just say "use ArrayList".)
>
>
> On 4/11/2013 3:31 PM, Ali Lahijani wrote:
>
>> I just want to express my delight at this great new feature.
>>
>> StreamBuilder can be used to append to or concatenate Streams:
>>
>>          StreamBuilder<E> builder = Streams.builder();
>>          s1.forEach(builder);
>>          builder.accept(x);
>>          builder.accept(y);
>>          s2.forEach(builder);
>>          Stream<E> stream = builder.build();
>>
>> And it can be used to create streams fluently, and in push mode, which
>> is arguably the way that feels most natural in many situations.
>>
>>          StreamBuilder.OfInt builder = Streams.intBuilder();
>>          for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
>>              if (isPrime(i)) {
>>                  build.accept(i)
>>              }
>>          }
>>          IntStream stream = builder.build();
>>
>> Though admittedly, streams built this way might benefit much from
>> Stream framework's support for parallelism.
>>
>> An observation:
>> The call to build() at the end should always be put there, and exactly
>> once. After that point, the builder should no longer be used. In line
>> with these rules, I would prefer the following syntax:
>>
>>          Stream<E> Streams.build((builder) -> {
>>              s1.forEach(builder);
>>              builder.accept(x);
>>              builder.accept(y);
>>              s2.forEach(builder);
>>          });
>>
>> The implicit call to build() is inserted after the lambda returns,
>> after which point the builder is no longer available to be used. I
>> think it feels more natural, and a bit more Lambda-like.
>>
>> Once again, thanks for giving us this great new tool!
>>
>> Best
>>
>>