What makes a HashSet different from a TreeSet in java?

By | March 5, 2023

In Java, both HashSet and TreeSet are implementations of the Set interface, but they have some important differences in their behavior:

  1. Ordering: HashSet does not maintain any order while TreeSet maintains the elements in sorted order based on their natural ordering or a custom Comparator.
  2. Performance: HashSet provides constant-time performance O(1) for the basic operations like add(), remove() and contains(), while TreeSet provides a slower logarithmic time O(log n) performance for these operations due to maintaining the elements in a sorted order.
  3. Duplication: HashSet allows only one null element and does not allow duplicates of other elements, whereas TreeSet does not allow any null elements and does not allow duplicates of other elements.
  4. Memory consumption: HashSet requires less memory as compared to TreeSet, due to not storing any ordering information.
  5. Use case: HashSet is typically used when ordering is not important and faster basic operations are desired, while TreeSet is useful when a sorted set is required and the log time complexity is acceptable for basic operations.

Overall, HashSet is generally faster and requires less memory, but does not maintain any ordering or sorted elements, while TreeSet provides sorted elements with slower performance and no duplicates or null elements.

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