stream() / parallelStream() methods

[Doug Lea]

On 02/09/13 11:41, Brian Goetz wrote:

> You can't drop a bomb like that and walk away!  You have to explain why you
> don't like it, because I suspect most people's first guess about why will be wrong.
>
> I'll take my best stab at explaining why:

Yes, thanks. Stateful Stream methods are clearly problematic.
Most people like them anyway because they are convenient.
And in any case, whenever they show up, many API discussions follow.


>  because it (like the stateful methods
> (sort, distinct, limit)) which you also don't like, move us incrementally
> farther from being able to express stream pipelines in terms of traditional
> data-parallel constructs, which further constrains our ability to to map them
> directly to tomorrow's computing substrate, whether that be vector processors,
> FPGAs, GPUs, or whatever we cook up.
>
> Filter-map-reduce map very cleanly to all sorts of parallel computing
> substrates; filter-parallel-map-sequential-sorted-limit-parallel-map-uniq-reduce
> does not.
>
> So the whole API design here embodies many tensions between making it easy to
> express things the user is likely to want to express, and doing is in a manner
> that we can predictably make fast with transparent cost models.
>