Rule of thumb for choosing an implementation of a Java Collection?

Question

Anyone have a good rule of thumb for choosing between different implementations of Java Collection interfaces like List, Map, or Set?

For example, generally why or i

Answer 1

Use Map for key-value pairing

For key-value tracking, use Map implementation.

For example, tracking which person is covering which day of the weekend. So we want to map a DayOfWeek object to an Employee object.

Map < DayOfWeek , Employee > weekendWorker = 
    Map.of( 
        DayOfWeek.SATURDAY , alice ,
        DayOfWeek.SUNDAY , bob
    )
;

When choosing one of the Map implementations, there are several aspects to consider. These include: concurrency, tolerance for NULL values in key and/or value, order when iterating keys, tracking by reference versus content, and convenience of literals syntax.

Here is a chart I made showing the various aspects of each of the ten Map implementations bundled with Java 11.