Question

Is it bad practice to use mutable objects as Hashmap keys? What happens when you try to retrieve a value from a Hashmap using a key that has been modified enough to change its hashcode?

For example, given

class Key
{
    int a; //mutable field
    int b; //mutable field

    public int hashcode()
        return foo(a, b);
    // setters setA and setB omitted for brevity
}

with code

HashMap<Key, Value> map = new HashMap<Key, Value>();

Key key1 = new Key(0, 0);
map.put(key1, value1); // value1 is an instance of Value

key1.setA(5);
key1.setB(10);

What happens if we now call map.get(key1)? Is this safe or advisable? Or is the behavior dependent on the language?

Answer 1

It has been noted by many well respected developers such as Brian Goetz and Josh Bloch that :

If an object’s hashCode() value can change based on its state, then we
must be careful when using such objects as keys in hash-based
collections to ensure that we don’t allow their state to change when
they are being used as hash keys. All hash-based collections assume
that an object’s hash value does not change while it is in use as a
key in the collection. If a key’s hash code were to change while it
was in a collection, some unpredictable and confusing consequences
could follow. This is usually not a problem in practice — it is not
common practice to use a mutable object like a List as a key in a
HashMap.