Scala Buffer: Size or Length?

Question

I am using a mutable Buffer and need to find out how many elements it has.

Both size and length methods are defined, inherited

Answer 1

In this case, they can be considered synonyms. You may want to watch out with some other cases such as Array - whilst length and size will always return the same result, in versions prior to Scala 2.10 there may be a boxing overhead for calling size (which is provided by a Scala wrapper around the Array), whereas length is provided by the underlying Java Array.

In Scala 2.10, this overhead has been removed by use of a value class providing the size method, so you should feel free to use whichever method you like.