Hashset vs Treeset

Question

I\'ve always loved trees, that nice O(n*log(n)) and the tidiness of them. However, every software engineer I\'ve ever known has asked me pointedly why I would u

Answer 1

HashSet implementations are, of course, much much faster -- less overhead because there's no ordering. A good analysis of the various Set implementations in Java is provided at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/collections/implementations/set.html.

The discussion there also points out an interesting 'middle ground' approach to the Tree vs Hash question. Java provides a LinkedHashSet, which is a HashSet with an "insertion-oriented" linked list running through it, that is, the last element in the linked list is also the most recently inserted into the Hash. This allows you to avoid the unruliness of an unordered hash without incurring the increased cost of a TreeSet.