I put together the following class, ChunkedArrayList, in response to Martin's request (excerpted from an earlier conversation on this web board) below.
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6brz3MPBDdhMGNiNGIwMTQtMTgxMi00ODlmLTk4ZGYtOWY2NDE0M2E5M2Zl&sort=name&layout=list&num=50 Thoughts? Regards, Kevin On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Martin Buchholz <marti...@google.com> wrote: It surely is not a good idea to use a single backing array for huge arrays. As you point out, it's up to 32GB for just one object. But the core JDK doesn't offer a suitable alternative for users who need very large collections. It would have been more in the spirit of Java to have a collection class instead of ArrayList that was not fastest at any particular operation, but had excellent asymptotic behaviour, based on backing arrays containing backing arrays. But: - no such excellent class has been written yet (or please point me to such a class) - even if it were, such a best-of-breed-general-purpose List implementation would probably need to be introduced as a separate class, because of the performance expectations of existing implementations. In the meantime, we have to maintain what we got, and that includes living with arrays and classes that wrap them. Changing the spec is unlikely to succeed.. Martin
