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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T02:28:04+00:00

This may be a silly question but I am reading about that Hashtables and

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This may be a silly question but I am reading about that Hashtables and Dictionaries are faster than a list because they index the items with keys.

I know a List or Array is for elements without values, and a Dictionary is for elements with values. So I would think that it maybe be smart to have a Dictionary with the value that you need as a key and the value equal in all of them?

Update:

Based on the comments what I think I need is a HashSet. This question talks about their performance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    “Faster” depends on what you need them for.

    A .NET List is just a slab of continuous memory (this in not a linked list), which makes it extremely efficient to access sequentially (especially when you consider the effects of caching and prefetching of modern CPUs) or “randomly” trough a known integer index. Searching or inserting elements (especially in the middle) – not so much.

    Dictionary is an associative data structure – a key can be anything hashable (not just integer index), but elements are not sorted in a “meaningful” way and the access through the known key is not as fast as List‘s integer index.

    So, pick the right tool for the job.

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