Question

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Scala list concatenation, ::: vs ++

In Scala, say I have two lists

scala> val oneTwo = List(1,2)
oneTwo: List[Int] = List(1, 2)

and

scala> val threeFour = List(3,4)
threeFour: List[Int] = List(3, 4)

I can concatenates Lists by doing:

scala> oneTwo ::: threeFour
res30: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4)

Or

scala> oneTwo ++ threeFour
res31: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4)

What is the difference between both approaches?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The ::: method is specific to List, while ++ is part of any Traversable.

The difference arise out of two things. First, List is one of the original Scala collections, used a lot in the compiler, and subject to special optimizations. The :: concatenation is the same as used in the ML family of languages, one of the big Scala inspirations, and ::: extrapolates from it.

On the other hand, ++ came along with the redesign of Scala collections on Scala 2.8.0, which made methods and inheritance uniform. I think it existed before that (on Set, for example), but the collections did not share a common superclass, so it was basically an ad hoc method for other collections.

In terms of performance, ::: should beat ++, but probably not significantly.