On 07/28/2010 02:07 AM, Nick Palmer wrote:
It would be very nice if GenericArray implemented List. I need get,
set, and remove in GenericData.Array for my application and have
already added these to my Avro code so I can continue developing. I
was planning to file a patch in JIRA for this change.
This would be a great patch to have!
The trouble with making GenericArray implement List is that
List.size() returns an int and GenericArray.size() returns a long. Is
there a reason for this?
Avro arrays can be arbitrarily long, written as blocks. The thinking
was that the interface should expose the length as a long, permitting
implementations that might page values from disk as you iterate. The
collision with List#size() is unfortunate.
We could either:
a. unilaterally change GenericArray#size() to return int; or
b. rename GenericArray#size() to be something else, like arraySize()
or somesuch, so that someone could still implement a version that's paged.
My instinct is towards (a). If/when someone ever implements a paged
representation for GenericArray they can perhaps add a method with the
full size then.
Doug
