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Comment by kmontrose | Hacker News Reader

What about interface defaults prevents or precludes that hack/optimization? You have exactly the same information after all.

For example (disclaimer, it's been a bit since I've touched these classes; but you should get the idea), an extension of Iterator that adds a longSize() method would probably want to make use of ArrayList's size() rather than iterating over the whole thing too.

As an aside, if your code absolutely and utterly depends on a certain operation's runtime performance you had better be using a type that actually guarantees that performance. List<T> guarantees Count is O(1) ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/27b47ht3.aspx ) , IEnumerable<T> doesn't ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb338038 ); that's your bug.

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You're missing the point. The problem is that as an author you have to implement an interface which is probably completely unrelated to what your class is doing, otherwise you get punished by bad performance.

Scala solves this problem nicely with traits, btw.

I may also be missing the point but what prevents you from putting a count method on an enumerable with a default implementation which does the same?

In terms of .Count() which will attempt to call ICollection.Count you can create the same thing as an extension method or a default implementation on Enumerable.

Either way you do it you will have ambiguity regarding time complexity.

Extension methods have the advantage that the langauge designers _could_ have left .Count() off IEnumerable and then people who wanted to use it could implement it themselves and those worried about the ambiguity wouldn't have to risk people enumerating their collection needlessly.

The problem with extension methods over default implementation interfaces is that the code regarding a class can be distributed in several (potentially non-obvious) locations and it reduces portability.

The advantage is that you can extend a class or an interface you don't own, and you can have implementations specific to a given namespace.

So for a (poor) example you might extend float so you could convert an angle to a 2d unit vector, but only in given bits of your program you want to be converting between angles and vectors.

> I may also be missing the point but what prevents you from putting a count method on an enumerable with a default implementation which does the same?

Isn't that exactly what we're talking about?

The huge difference between C#'s extension methods and traits is that the first one is statically dispatched, the second one dynamically.

This means classes with a better implementation can just override Count() and suffer none of the problems of the extension method approach.

Scala also offers implicits to "enrich" existing types, slightly comparable to Extension methods, but a lot more general.

Whereas extension methods only support some ad-hoc "addition" of members to existing types, Scala's implicits allow you to use these methods to implement new interfaces -- and isn't that the reason why you add methods in the first place: to implement interfaces?

> So for a (poor) example you might extend float so you could convert an angle to a 2d unit vector, but only in given bits of your program you want to be converting between angles and vectors.

   implicit def floatTo2DUnitVector(angle: Float) = 2DUnitVector(...)

Done. Import where you need it.

Btw, C# has some limited form of implicits, too, but I haven't seen any serious usage of them for a while.

> This means classes with a better implementation can just override Count() and suffer none of the problems of the extension method approach.

Instance methods are bound before extension methods, if someone provides an implementation of Count() in a subclass it'll be invoked instead (provided your reference is typed appropriately). More narrow extension methods are bound before general ones, so you can even "override" within extension methods.

Scala has some neat stuff, but it's not Java 8 so I don't see how it's relevant.

> Btw, C# has some limited form of implicits, too, but I haven't seen any serious usage of them for a while.

C# has implicit conversion operators you can define, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z5z9kes2(v=vs.100).a... . You'd better have a really good reason for defining one though, silent conversions are generally frowned upon.

That's exactly the issue I'm talking about: you can't “enforce” the static type, so different methods get called depending on whether you pass List foo = MyList(...) or MyList foo = MyList(...), which is acceptable for static methods, but a source of bugs when they can be made to look like instance methods.

> Scala has some neat stuff, but it's not Java 8 so I don't see how it's relevant.

Java's default methods are basically Scala's traits (just made a bit more cumbersome to make Java developers feel right at home), so what I said about traits applies to “interfaces with default methods”, too.

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