On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Greg Brown<[email protected]> wrote:
> Honestly, I'm getting a little sick of having to justify why we wrote our
> own collections.

The fact that you wrote your own implementations when the standard is
available is for lots of devs reason enough to question their
existence. You better be really sure that your own implementation
makes every claim true.

> They are an integral part of the platform and we want the
> most optimized implementation we can get. The JDK collections just don't cut
> it for our use cases.

Then make that absolutely clear. Don't tell folks that it helps
debugging, because folks already know the Collections API inside and
out. Don't say it is better performance wise, because you need to back
that up, and I seriously doubt the performance benefit outweighs the
additional API maintenance overhead. Collection APIs are not simple to
implement correctly.

If your focus is that you need to be able to register event listeners,
then I'm much more inclined to support your decision, since I don't
remember seeing any listener API for the Java Collections.

> I don't hear anyone complaining that the Groovy and
> Scala guys, for example, defined their own collections (presumably for
> similar reasons).

Not the same reasoning: they created their own *LANGUAGE* with
different syntax and language level features that are not available in
the Java language (for example closures). You are still (just) a Java
library that needs to abide to Java syntax and Java libraries.

Martijn

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