Java collections maintaining insertion order

Question

Why do some collection data structures not maintain the order of insertion   What is the special thing achieved compared to maintaining order of insertion  Do we gain something if we don t maintain the order

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Theres s a section in the O Reilly Java Cookbook called  Avoiding the urge to sort   The question you should be asking is actually the opposite of your original question      Do we gain something by sorting    It take a lot of effort to sort and maintain that order   Sure sorting is easy but it usually doesn t scale in most programs   If you re going to be handling thousands or tens of thousands of requests  insrt del get etc  per second whether not you re using a sorted or non sorted data structure is seriously going to matter

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The insertion order is inherently not maintained  in hash tables - that s just how they work  read the linked-to article to understand the details   It s possible to add logic to maintain the insertion order  as in the LinkedHashMap   but that takes more code  and at runtime more memory and more time  The performance loss is usually not significant  but it can be  For TreeSet Map  the main reason to use them is the natural iteration order and other functionality added in the SortedSet Map interface

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Performance  If you want the original insertion order there are the LinkedXXX classes  which maintain an additional linked list in insertion order  Most of the time you don t care  so you use a HashXXX  or you want a natural order  so you use TreeXXX  In either of those cases why should you pay the extra cost of the linked list

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some Collection are not maintain the order because of  they calculate the hashCode of content and store it accordingly in the appropriate bucket

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Okay     so these posts are old as compared to now  but insertion order is needed depending on your need or application requirements  so just use the right type of collection  For most part  it is not needed  but in a situation where you need to utilize objects in the order they were stored  I see a definite need  I think order matters when you are creating for instance a wizard or a flow engine or something of that nature where you need to go from state to state or something  In that sense you can read off stuff from the list without having it keep track of what you need next or traverse a list to find what you want  It does help with performance in that sense  It does matter or else these collections would not make much sense

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When you use a HashSet  or a HashMap  data are stored in  buckets  based on the hash of your object  This way your data is easier to access because you don t have to look for this particular data in the whole Set  you just have to look in the right bucket   This way you can increase performances on specific points   Each Collection implementation have its particularity to make it better to use in a certain condition  Each of those particularities have a cost  So if you don t really need it  for example the insertion order  you better use an implementation which doesn t offer it and fits better to your requirements

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I can t  cite a reference  but by design the List and Set implementations of the Collection interface are basically extendable Arrays  As Collections by default offer methods to dynamically add and remove elements at any point -- which Arrays don t -- insertion order might not be preserved   Thus  as there are more methods for content manipulation  there is a need for special implementations that do preserve order   Another point is performance  as the most well performing Collection might not be that  which preserves its insertion order  I m however not sure  how exactly Collections manage their content for performance increases   So  in short  the two major reasons I can think of why there are order-preserving Collection implementations are    Class architecture Performance

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Depends on what you need the implementation to do well   Insertion order usually is not interesting so there is no need to maintain it so you can rearrange to get better performance   For Maps it is usually HashMap and TreeMap that is used   By using hash codes  the entries can be put in small groups easy to search in   The TreeMap maintains a sorted order of the inserted entries at the cost of slower search  but easier to sort than a HashMap

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Why is it necessary to maintain the order of insertion  If you use HashMap  you can get the entry by key  It does not mean it does not provide classes that do what you want

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The collections don t maintain order of insertion  Some just default to add a new value at the end  Maintaining order of insertion is only useful if you prioritize the objects by it or use it to sort objects in some way   As for why some collections maintain it by default and others don t  this is mostly caused by the implementation and only sometimes part of the collections definition    Lists maintain insertion order as just adding a new entry at the end or the beginning is the fastest implementation of the add Object   method  Sets The HashSet and TreeSet implementations don t maintain insertion order as the objects are sorted for fast lookup and maintaining insertion order would require additional memory  This results in a performance gain since insertion order is almost never interesting for Sets    ArrayDeque a deque can used for simple que and stack so you want to have   first in first out   or   first in last out   behaviour  both require that the ArrayDeque maintains insertion order  In this case the insertion order is maintained as a central part of the classes contract

[java] Java collections maintaining insertion order

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