Java collections cheat sheet

Danila Varatyntsev
1 min readJun 6, 2021

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All java collections overview. Comparison is made by the following characteristics:

  1. Backed by — what data structure or collection is used under the hood
  2. Duplicates — whether duplicate values are allowed in collection
  3. Nulls allowed — whether collection allows inserting nulls
  4. Syncronized — are all methods of the collection syncronized or not
  5. Thread-safe — whether it’s safe to use this collection in a multi-threaded environment
  6. Iterator type — iterator behaviour in multi-threaded environment
Java collections overview

Iterator types explained:

  1. fail-fast — iterator saves a collection’s “generation number” on creation, which is basically the number of changed made to collection. During the iteration it compares current generation with saved. If they are different, a ConcurrentModificationException is thrown
  2. snapshot-type — iterator saves a snapshot of a collection and iterates through it. Never throws ConcurrentModificationException.
  3. weakly consistent — may (but not guaranteed to) reflect some changes to the collection during the iteration. Don’t throw ConcurrentModificationException.

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