Let Me Check That Out
Jul. 8th, 2019 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperWe had some code that was running slowly across a list of some 20K members. It turns out that the reason it was running slowly was that rather than just adding new members, we checked each member of the list to make sure that we weren't adding a *duplicate* member with the new add. This works fine for short lists, but is pretty much abominable by the time you're adding 20K members.
"Well," I said to myself. That's easy enough to fix. I can just add a hashCode() (and matching equals()) method to the class for the members that are being added to the list; then add a HashSet to keep track of what's already in the list, because that will look things up in a hurry. In fact, we should just make a class that welds a HashSet to the side of our ArrayList, because I know I've solved a similar problem before and we may as well not have to *keep* solving it."
I then paused and ran a brief search.
Right. ListOrderedSet in Apache Commons. I figured someone else had had this problem before...
Did I mention how nice it is to be working in a language with modern libraries available?
"Well," I said to myself. That's easy enough to fix. I can just add a hashCode() (and matching equals()) method to the class for the members that are being added to the list; then add a HashSet to keep track of what's already in the list, because that will look things up in a hurry. In fact, we should just make a class that welds a HashSet to the side of our ArrayList, because I know I've solved a similar problem before and we may as well not have to *keep* solving it."
I then paused and ran a brief search.
Right. ListOrderedSet in Apache Commons. I figured someone else had had this problem before...
Did I mention how nice it is to be working in a language with modern libraries available?
no subject
Date: 2019-07-08 11:35 pm (UTC)