Benefits of arrays
- by Vitalii Fedorenko
As I see it, the advantages of List over array are pretty obvious:
Generics provide more precise typing: List<Integer>, List<? extends Number>, List<? super Integer>.
List interface has a bunch useful methods: addAll, remove etc. While for arrays all standard operations except get/set must be performed in a procedure manner by passing it to a static method.
Collections offer different implementations like ArrayList, LinkedList, unmodifieable and synchronized lists, which can be hidden under common List interface.
OOB length control.
As disadvantages I can only mention absence of syntactic sugar and runtime type check. At the same time supporting of both structures requires frequent using of asList and toArray methods, which makes code less readable. So I am curious if there are any important benefits of using arrays that I miss.
