When should I use a TreeMap over a PriorityQueue and vice versa?

Question

Seems they both let you retrieve the minimum, which is what I need for Prim\'s algorithm, and force me to remove and reinsert a key to update its value. Is there any advanta

Answer 1

It all depends what you want to achieve. Here are the main points to consider before you choose one over other.

1. PriorityQueue Allows Duplicate(i.e with same priority) while TreeMap doesn't.
2. Complexity of PriorityQueue is O(n)(when is increases its size), while that of TreeMap is O(logn)(as it is based on Red Black Tree)
3. PriorityQueue is based on Array while in TreeMap nodes are linked to each other, so contains method of PriorityQueue would take O(n) time while TreeMap would take O(logn) time.

Answer 2

I may be late to this answer but still.

They have their own use-cases, in which either one of them is a clear winner.

For Example:

1: https://leetcode.com/problems/my-calendar-i TreeMap is the one you are looking at

2: https://leetcode.com/problems/top-k-frequent-words you don't need the overhead of keys and values.

So my answer would be, look at the use-case, and see if that could be done without key and value, if yes, go for PQueue else move to TreeMap.