Maybe a dumb question, but is there such a thing a...

# getting-started

[Colton Idle]

Maybe a dumb question, but is there such a thing as a Map in Kotlin where you only need to specify the type of Key because you never actually plan on using the value? Or is there a different data structure that allows you to have constant time inserts and lookups?

Example: I just want to know if I already "saw" a number in a list that I'm traversing, so I'm currently saving the fact that I saw it as a mapOf<Int, Boolean>, but the very existence of the Int would suffice and so the boolean seems redundant

[Colton Idle]

OoooH. looks like hashSet is what I want. A bit confusing that

mutableHashSet doesn't exist, while hashSet does?

[Josh Eldridge]

well hashSetOf is the mutable version so there wouldn't exist a mutableHashSet, if you wanted an "immutable" set you'd call setOf which is just a LinkedHashSet cast to an immutable type

[Josh Eldridge]

It is interesting there is an immutable version for the ordered set but no immutable version for an unordered

[Josh Eldridge]

(and by immutable, it's really just read-only)

[Rob Elliot]

mutableSetOf would do wouldn’t it? You don’t care about the implementation.

[Joffrey]

Yeah a Set (or MutableSet) is what you want. As for the factory function, just like for lists and maps, use setOf for a read-only structure, mutableSetOf for a mutable structure. hashSetOf , arrayListOf and the likes are really for cases when the exact implemation matters, which is almost never the case

[Colton Idle]

Interesting. Well if I wanted constant time lookups and inserts, wouldn't I want to specify a hashSet then?

[Rob Elliot]

On the JVM, setOf and mutableSetOf both return a LinkedHashMap LinkedHashSet under the hood, so they are constant time for contains (and for add and remove in the mutable case).

They would never switch it to an implementation that performs worse in the general case.

Specifying collection implementations is almost certainly premature optimisation based on insufficient information. Use the defaults until you have a proof that you need something else.

[Colton Idle]

Interesting. I didn't know that a set was implemented with a hash map. I thought a set was pretty much a list that prevented duplicates.

[Rob Elliot]

Ugh, I mistyped... setOf and mutableSetOf are backed by LinkedHashSet, not LinkedHashMap. Sorry.

(Though it could be; implementing Set using a Map as you did is supported directly on the JVM - see java.util.Collections.newSetFromMap. I use that passing it a ConcurrentHashMap when I want a concurrent mutable set as so: val concurrentSet: MutableSet<String> = Collections.newSetFromMap(ConcurrentHashMap()))