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n
The whole handling of immutable in Kotlin is... pretty interesting.
It's not immediately obvious how expensive += can be.
On the other hand it's extremely convenient in some cases.
I think maybe += for Array would actually be better if it only had the overloads that accepted a bunch of new elements at once
When += is defined for adding a single element it makes it rather easy to write code that +='s in a loop
If you could only += iterators/collections/other lists, then it would push you away from very slow usages of List. But, potentially it would still be un-ergonomic in some cases...
Personally I think I'd be using mutable lists a lot as local variables in functions, and using List a lot in function signatures and as class members.
c
Yeah, this shit confused a new programmer to the language
n
(not really sure if your original post was about the cost of += or more about the type deduction of arrayOf)
c
Almost started doing that stuff
a
looks like you really dodged a bullet 😉
c
he dodged a bullet*
Not me 😛
a
not really sure what is confusing here 🙂
c
How?! lol
n
I'm not sure whether he's referring to the type deduction, or the performance of +=
but both are pretty confusing IMHO
a
I mean, what are you expecting when adding an object to an array?
i understand that this type deduction can be tricky, but why 
+=
is confusing?
s
In any other place its semantics indicate that it is "adding" onto its target
Here it creates an entirely new array, with one size larger, and replaces the null element at the end.
(which actually explains why it must be a var and not val)
a
oh, I understand. But it's not an operator issue, but really immutability thing
s
(since it has to replace the reference with the new array)
a
and it's done that way by design, not by accident
s
Ofc it is
That doesnt mean its a good idea xD
a
and you cannot compile reassigning a val
so still - I get that you might not like this type of programming, but i don't get why this is confusing - it never confused me before
s
It was never confusing to me
I just dont like it
a
why?
s
Because of its semantics
It implies its adding to the array like its a collection that supports resizing, when its not
a
and how it behaves with mutable collections?
s
?
a
what would happen if 
things
would be a mutable collection, instead of immutable?
s
Depends on the backend of the collection implementation
For arraylist, the array would be resized much larger than 1 to 1 on inserts
a
as I understand, we are talking about kotlin stdlib library 🙂
s
For set, it would depend on the backing map implementation used
n
@adamd it's confusing because appending a single element costs O(N)
And you don't really see many languages make doing something like this, so easy (to the point of including syntactic sugar to make it easier)
In languages that are "mostly mutable" like e.g. C++, push_back is an amortized operation and very fast.
In languages that are mostly immutable, your List is backed by a try immutable array implementation.
That doesn't do anything as naive as copy out the whole list.
*try -> true
a
ok, I get your point, it's valid and interesting
n
In Kotlin, when you can call += on a List, it doesn't actually know if it's even an immutable list or not. It just knows that it's List, or some subtype of List.
a
I just still don't get how:
Yeah, this shit confused a new programmer to the language
s
A new programmer would see that an assume it did the same thing as appending an element to a collection
a
I mean, if I am a 
new programmer to the language
, the cost of an adding an element to an array is not the first thing I'm expecting/thinking of
c
It should be something to note when using collections
s
How would you explain the difference between those @adamd?
n
Well, thinking about the constants, no,
I agree
but, if you do += on single elements in a loop
on a decent size loop
you will literally get way worse performance than e.g. python
a
yeah, doing this on an immutable array, probably yes
n
I guess a lot of these things are this way, because of the JVM and Java.
s
well its java
a
but it's not suprising for me that an immutable array is not optimized for lots of element adding
n
But personally, I think languages should either just go full immutable, or they should support 
const
a la C++, Rust, D
Anything other than one of these two approaches is a pretty big compromise
a
it is more suprising that it has 
operator fun
supporting adding an element
n
Well, x += y will desugar to x = x + y
c
Can't they deprecate the plus assign function?
a
maybe this is the issue you all are talking about - this convenient method that does not make you call 
copy
explicitly
n
You don't have to call copy explicitly. 
x = x + y
is already making copies, and it's pretty explicit about it
a
@camdenorrb because of less performance?
c
Yeah
a
@Nir you're right
n
So, for me, my Kotlin style guide would say: use MutableList as a local variable, and use List in function signatures and as a member of classes
and that would basically be it
s
I dont think the replacement of the copy function with 
+
is explicit enough to show what its actually doing
a
why?
s
Because its not adding to the array
a
if it copies whole array
s
Its creating a new array, and throwing the entire old one away
n
If you use MutableList locally you avoid performance pitfalls, and local variables by their nature are already immune to most of the pitfalls of mutability. If you use List in function signatures and as members, you are protected from most of the pitfalls of mutability.
s
For collections that have the 
add
function, it makes sense for them to support the 
+
operator
Because semantically, thats already there
c
It could literally be an IDE intention
To like, not do this
a
may I ask - what are you programming on a daily basis? 🙂
n
Who is that directed to?
a
I guess all discussion participants
n
Mostly C++, some python.
c
MineCraft plugins lol...
a
that is a lot of interesting points I've never thought of
s
Kotlin 90% of the time
And a good sprinkle of trashy Java
c
Almost 100% Kotlin for me
a
ok, so you are more from KotlinNative - world than Kotlin-JVM, huh? 😉
c
Nir?
Please ping the people you're referring to lol
a
Because I'm one of these JVM-spoiled kids, eating RAM for breakfast 🙂
s
ehhh
Im JVM spoiled too, but I still am constantly concerned with abusive stuff like that
a
So in my case we do not deal with this kind of memory issues, because we are more concerned not to be killed with our code readers
I get this, maybe this convenient method is, in some ways, confusing, but maybe some things are just left for programmers to think?
I mean, if you are doing a lot of heavy adding on immutable collection because there is a convenience method for this, I don't think that it is a language issue 😉
c
Still should be an IDE intention
a
what? warning about copying whole immutable collection?
s
language issue?
Its an extension funtion
...
a
not really convenient for users not doing this in the loop
@sxtanna my point exactly
s
Who said its a language issue?
a
I used it as a synonime for 
this shit
- maybe it was my misunderstanding, but I tried to understand where it came from 🙂
s
Who said that?
a
cam, I guess
probably ~100 messages ago 😉
c
I didn't say it was a language issue
I said it should be an intention in Intellij
a
like I said, misunderstanding
n
I'm just investigating Kotlin, not using it really in prod
I'd probably prefer native but don't really care
it's not fast anyway so it's irrelevant to me
(fast by C++ standards)
a
nevertheless, interesting points was made here 🙂 I will take it into account on my next array-issues
n
There are lots of things that suck in C++ but const is not one of them.
a
@Nir that's for sure, but I don't think it was designed to be faster than C++
n
I think for languages that want to have mutable data structures, and let's face it they are more intuitive for most people
then, those languages (if statically typed) should have 
const
At the end of the day, 95% of what I want is just to guarantee that the functions don't modify their arguments
a
maybe, I'm not big fan of mutability
n
Well, Kotlin is all about mutability, so... 🙂
List
is not an immutable data structure, it's just a read-only view of some data structure, that may or may not be immutable
a
well, have you met Java? 😉
n
Meh fundamentally it's not any different
MutableList
inheriting from 
List
, that wasn't invented in Kotlin
Copy code
val x: MutableList<Int> // populate
foo(x) { x += 5 }
a
I'm not stating it solves all my problems, but I believe that points me into a good direction
n
If you look at a situation like this, you can see that if 
foo
takes e.g. 
List
and a lambda
it clearly can't assume even in the local function scope, that its argument isn't changing
a
ofcourse, but we are talking about functional programming principles, not language itself
n
Yeah, I agree, it makes decent compromises. The thing is when you say "I'm not a fan of mutability", if you consider my suggestion with making locals mutable and function interfaces/class members not-mutable
a
don't blame him for not being not-functional
n
you will see that you avoid 95% of real world issues with mutability
If not more.
Fully immutable can be good too though, but that works much better if you have proper immutable implementations, which Kotlin doesn't have.
So, in Kotlin I think you have to be pragmatic and use both List and MutableList, hence my advice
If you use List/Map/Set everywhere, especially on a team of varying experience levels, you will likely be running into performance explosions on a semi-regular basis
a
not in my part of IT-world
like I said before, I'm JVM-spoiled-kid
we have a lot of memory to eat
I'm not proud of that, but that is a fact
if we have performance issues, it is mostly because of some misuse of a framework or library, or a memory leak
or, if somebody fetches really large amounts of data and makes calculations on them
n
Making something quadratic that should be linear can bring things down very very very fast
No matter the world
a
still - not my case, but I like to see other points of view - it provides me with constant improvement of my skills
n
SO quite literally went down for nearly an hour
because they used some regex whose implementation happened to be quadratic in the number of consecutive whitespace characters
someone had a weird post with like 2K consecutive whitespace characters, boom
that's all it took
The problem is actually not really peak memory usage because the JVM is pretty smart about seeing that an object is short lived and recycling it.
It's just literally all the performance cost of copy those elements over and over.
a
like I said - this is the reason why I took part in this discussion in the first place
this is not something I was thinking of when coding
but it is also important
and very often ignored
n
Right. So, for me, coming from C++ which is an edge case filled language, we are used to coding guidelines. if you can come up with a good coding guideline that reduces complexity and gives you 99% of the benefit of making an informed decision in each specific case, it's a great thing. especially in a team environment.
If you use MutableList locally you avoid these problems for free, and there's almost no chance of running into other problems.
As long as you keep using List elsewhere.
c
Jit can make Kotlin and Java faster than C++ at times
Also these are mainly structure problems you're referring to, with the proper setup you won't run into these issues
g
talking about 
plus/+
and confusion: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-9992
how about 
plus
and 
plusElement
🙂
n
@camdenorrb this is one of those things that's technically true, yes.
But when you are talking about people using C++ for serious performance requirements it's basically never going to be true.
Before C++11 there were places using Java in my industry, but you really had to fight a lot to get the performance the way you wanted, turn off GC, etc
at that point it's not really idiomatic java and you lose a lot of the benefit. That sort of thing has largely vanished as C++ has improved considerably
c
What are you making exactly?
n
HFT
c
Ah hmmmmm, idk I don't feel like nanosecond differences would be that big of an issue
n
what do you mean, nanosecond differences?
The differences between well written C++ and well written Java can be a lot more than that
I mean, minecraft was rewritten, right.
Believe me they don't care about nanos there. They barely care about micros.
In C++ you can define a struct and you know that 
vector<Foo>
is completely contiguous in memory.
That's a really big deal and not currently possible in Java.
(or kotlin)
c
Please don't compare anything about Java to Minecraft
Minecraft's code is actual spaghetti
It just really depends on how you write the code for the performance you'll get out of it, I personally haven't experienced any performance issues over the past 5 years besides when I wanted to make a screensharing program and realize the JVM impl for screenshots was hella slow
But I can just use LWJGL for that
n
My understanding is that in minecraft it because a really difficult issue that some basic type, I think 
Vec3
, which was literally 3 doubles, was pointer-indirected (like all Java types other than int, etc)
But anyhow if you are writing anything that only has to be fast enough for humans, you are operating on wildly different timescales.
When a microsecond is a ton of time you can imagine how much of a control freak you need to be.
We're regularly looking at how various C++ abstractions get compiled to assembly to convince ourselves whether the compilers can consistently optimize them out (and therefore whether we can use them freely or not)
etc
t
Note that for a generic 
List
, Kotlin uses 
ArrayList
, which is amortized O(1) to add elements, so it's doing the same thing under the hood, but isn't nearly so awful. tl;dr Use 
List
instead of 
Array
if the size will change.
n
@Toddobryan that would be if you use 
MutableList
When you have a 
List
you can't perform any operations that modify the object (unless you downcast first)
x += 1
for a 
List
is just syntactic sugar for 
x = x.plus(1)
(assuming 
x
is a 
var
)
t
@Nir Good point. I guess what I meant to say is that it's more efficient to append a single element at the end of a mutable 
List
. This is different than Scala, which uses 
Cons
lists, so it's O(1) to add at the beginning, but O(n) to add at the end. Because of the way 
ArrayList
works, the reverse is true in Kotlin.
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