Persistent (immutable) collections for Java and Kotlin

What are Dexx Collections?

Dexx Collections are a port of Scala's immutable, persistent collection classes to pure Java.

Persistent in the context of functional data structures means the data structure preserves the previous version of itself when modified. This means any reference to a collection is effectively immutable. However, modifications can be made by returning a new version of the data structure, leaving the original structure unchanged.

Here's an example using Dexx's Sets (examples are in Kotlin for conciseness, but the collections are pure Java):

val set1 = Sets.of(1, 2, 3)
val set2 = set1.add(4)
val set3 = set1.remove(1)
println(set1) // Prints Set(1, 2, 3)
println(set2) // Prints Set(1, 2, 3, 4)
println(set3) // Prints Set(2, 3)

From the above example we can see that although we've made modifications to set1 to create set2 and set3, the contents of set1 remain unchanged.

Note: There's now first class support for Kotlin - see the [kollection module README](kollection/README.md) for more information.

Why port?

Scala's collections can be directly used from Java, but the resulting code is far from idiomatic. Scala's standard library is also large and binary incompatible between versions.

Secondly, a pure Java implementation of functional persistent collections is usable from not only Java, but other JVM languages that interoperate with Java such as Kotlin, Ceylon or GWT. In fact, the collections have been specifically designed for use with Kotlin.

Overview

The diagram below shows Dexx's class hierarchy (interfaces are in blue and concrete implementations are in green).

Note that the interfaces such as Map, Set and List are not related to the java.util equivalents as persistent collections require all modification methods such as add and remove to return a new collection instance.

Status

• All collections have been implemented
• HashSet, TreeSet, HashMap, TreeMap and Vector are ports from Scala
• ConsList and ArrayList have been written from scratch.
• Helper classes for construction and adapters to java.util collections are available
• Test coverage is fairly comprehensive: 95% line and 90% branch at present

Dependencies

• There are no runtime dependencies
• JetBrain's annotations (@NotNull and @Nullable) are used in the source to support Kotlin's nullable types, but they are not required at runtime.
• The tests are written in Kotlin, but again this is not a runtime dependency

Roadmap

• Explore annotating methods that return a new collection with @CheckReturnValue to allow static verification of collection usage.
• Active development is essentially complete. Further work is expected to be bug fixes and refinements.

Release Notes

• 0.7:
  • Fixes #11 - a balancing error in red black trees
• 0.6:
  • Added OSGI metadata (thanks ajs6f)
  • Make internal fields final (thanks mkull)
  • Performance improvement to first and last of TreeMap & TreeSet (thanks mkull)
• 0.5:
  • Updated to 1.0.0
  • Added toImmutableMap() conversions from existing Maps
• 0.4:
  • Updated to 1.0.0-rc-1036
  • Removed accidental assertJ compile dependency in kollection (thanks @brianegan)
• 0.3.1:
  • Added a native Kotlin api in the kollection module
  • Converted the build to gradle from maven
  • Renamed dexx-collections artifact to collection
• 0.2:
  • Add LinkedLists support with ConsList as the default implementation
  • Add ArrayList as an alternative IndexedList implementation
  • Formalise the Builder contract and enforce at runtime
• 0.1:
  • Includes ports of Scala's HashSet, TreeSet, HashMap, TreeMap and Vector

License

This project is licensed under a MIT license. Portions ported from Scala are Scala's 3-clause BSD license.

Usage

Adding to your project

Version 0.7 has been released and is available in Maven Central here. You can use it via the following gradle dependency:

'com.github.andrewoma.dexx:collection:0.7' // For Java
'com.github.andrewoma.dexx:kollection:0.7' // For Kotlin

Constructing collections

Each of the leaf interfaces (Set, SortedSet, Map, SortedMap, IndexedList and LinkedList) have associated companion classes with static methods for construction.

The companion class uses the plural form of the interface. e.g. Set has a companion class of Sets.

To build a collection from a fixed number of elements, use the overloaded of() methods. e.g.

val set = Sets.of(1, 2, 3)

To build a collection from a java.util collection, use the copyOf() methods. e.g.

val set = Sets.copyOf(javaCollection)

Builders should be used when incrementally constructing a collection. This allows for more efficient structures to be used internally during construction. In the case of LinkedList, using a builder is important as LinkedList does not support appending without copying the entire collection.

val builder = Sets.builder<Int>()
for (i in 1..100) {
    builder.add(i)
}
val set = builder.build()

Viewing as java.util collections

Unfortunately, the java.util collection interfaces are not compatible with persistent collections as modifications such as add() must return a new collection instance, leaving the original untouched.

However, all collections can be viewed as an immutable form of their java.util equivalent by using the the as...() methods.

val javaSet = Sets.of(1, 2, 3).asSet() // Now a java.util.Set

Where are filter(), map() and friends?

Such transformations are deliberately not supported:

• In JDK versions < 1.8, using a functional style is ugly and not recommended. See Excessive use of Guava's functional programming idioms can lead to verbose, confusing, unreadable, and inefficient code.

• In Kotlin and JDK 1.8, the platform provides transformations that can be used on the collections for free. Adding another set of transformations directly to the collections (with subtly different semantics) seems harmful.

Here's an example of using lazy evaluation in a functional style with Kotlin:

val set = SortedSets.of(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).asSequence()
        .filter { it % 2 == 0 }
        .map { "$it is even" }
        .take(2)
        .toImmutableSet()

assertEquals(SortedSets.of("2 is even", "4 is even"), set)

The example above uses Kotlins in-built extension function that converts any Iterable into a Sequence. It also uses the following extension functions to add Sequence<T>.toImmutableSet() to cleanly convert the sequence back into a Dexx Collection.

fun <T, R> Sequence<T>.build(builder: Builder<T, R>): R {
    this.forEach { builder.add(it) }
    return builder.build()
}

fun <T> Sequence<T>.toImmutableSet(): SortedSet<T> = build(SortedSets.builder<T>())

Performance

Benchmarking is still a work in progress (all the warnings about JVM benchmarks apply). The results so far running on Mac OS X 10.11.1 x86_64 with JDK 1.8.0_65 (Oracle Corporation 25.65-b01) are here.

My conclusions so far are that the collections perform adequately to be used as a drop-in replacement for the majority of use cases. While slower, slow is generally referring to millions of operations per second.

In general, mutating methods incur a overhead of 2-5 times that of java.util equivalents and reading operations are 1-1.5 time slower.

@ptitjes Has done some more rigorous benchmarks here: https://github.com/ptitjes/benchmark-immutables/blob/master/results/2016-10-02-23:56:36.pdf

Development

• Dexx is built with gradle. Use ./gradlew install to build and install into your local repository.
• To run the benchmarks, use ./gradlew check -PdexxTestMode=BENCHMARK --info | grep '^ BENCHMARK:'.
• To generate coverage reports, use: ./gradlew :collection:clean :collection:check :collection:jacocoTestReport open collection/build/jacocoHtml/index.html
• By default, a quick version of tests are run. Getting better test coverage of Vectors requires large collections. To run tests with complete coverage use: ./gradlew -PdexxTestMode=COMPLETE :collection:clean :collection:check :collection:jacocoTestReport

Method counts

For android developers, here are method counts:

• 'com.github.andrewoma.dexx:collection:0.6' = 1036 methods
• 'com.github.andrewoma.dexx:kollection:0.6' = 1213 methods