In Java, what are the advantages of streams over loops?

Question

I was asked this at an interview and I'm not convinced I gave the best answer I could have. I mentioned that you can do a parallel search and that null values were handled by some means I couldn't remember. Now I realize I was thinking of Optionals. What am I missing here? They claim it's better or more concise code but I'm not sure I agree.

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Considering how succinctly it was answered, it seems that this wasn't too broad a question after all.

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If they are asking this question at interviews, and clearly they are, what purpose could breaking it down serve other than to make it harder to find an answer? I mean, what are you looking for? I could break down the question and have all the sub-questions answered but then create a parent question with links to all the subquestions... seems pretty silly though. While we are at it, please give me an example of a less broad question. I know of no way to ask only part of this question and still get a meaningful answer. I could ask exactly the same question in a different way. For example, I could ask "What purpose do streams serve?" or "When would I use a stream instead of a for loop?" or "Why bother with streams instead of for loops?" These are all exactly the same question though.

...or is it considered too broad because someone gave a really long multi-point answer? Frankly anyone in the know could do that with virtually any question. If you happen to be one of the authors of the JVM, for example, you could probably talk about for loops all day long when most of us couldn't.

"Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question."

As noted below, an adequate answer has been given which proves that there is one and that it is easy enough to provide.

Answer 1

Interesting that the interview question asks about the advantages, without asking about disadvantages, for there are are both.

Streams are a more declarative style. Or a more expressive style. It may be considered better to declare your intent in code, than to describe how it's done:

 return people
     .filter( p -> p.age() < 19)
     .collect(toList());

... says quite clearly that you're filtering matching elements from a list, whereas:

 List<Person> filtered = new ArrayList<>();
 for(Person p : people) {
     if(p.age() < 19) {
         filtered.add(p);
     }
 }
 return filtered;

Says "I'm doing a loop". The purpose of the loop is buried deeper in the logic.

Streams are often terser. The same example shows this. Terser isn't always better, but if you can be terse and expressive at the same time, so much the better.

Streams have a strong affinity with functions. Java 8 introduces lambdas and functional interfaces, which opens a whole toybox of powerful techniques. Streams provide the most convenient and natural way to apply functions to sequences of objects.

Streams encourage less mutability. This is sort of related to the functional programming aspect -- the kind of programs you write using streams tend to be the kind of programs where you don't modify objects.

Streams encourage looser coupling. Your stream-handling code doesn't need to know the source of the stream, or its eventual terminating method.

Streams can succinctly express quite sophisticated behaviour. For example:

 stream.filter(myfilter).findFirst();

Might look at first glance as if it filters the whole stream, then returns the first element. But in fact findFirst() drives the whole operation, so it efficiently stops after finding one item.

Streams provide scope for future efficiency gains. Some people have benchmarked and found that single-threaded streams from in-memory Lists or arrays can be slower than the equivalent loop. This is plausible because there are more objects and overheads in play.

But streams scale. As well as Java's built-in support for parallel stream operations, there are a few libraries for distributed map-reduce using Streams as the API, because the model fits.

Disadvantages?

Performance: A for loop through an array is extremely lightweight both in terms of heap and CPU usage. If raw speed and memory thriftiness is a priority, using a stream is worse.

Familiarity.The world is full of experienced procedural programmers, from many language backgrounds, for whom loops are familiar and streams are novel. In some environments, you want to write code that's familiar to that kind of person.

Cognitive overhead. Because of its declarative nature, and increased abstraction from what's happening underneath, you may need to build a new mental model of how code relates to execution. Actually you only need to do this when things go wrong, or if you need to deeply analyse performance or subtle bugs. When it "just works", it just works.

Debuggers are improving, but even now, when you're stepping through stream code in a debugger, it can be harder work than the equivalent loop, because a simple loop is very close to the variables and code locations that a traditional debugger works with.

Answer 2

Syntactic fun aside, Streams are designed to work with potentially infinitely large data sets, whereas arrays, Collections, and nearly every Java SE class which implements Iterable are entirely in memory.

A disadvantage of a Stream is that filters, mappings, etc., cannot throw checked exceptions. This makes a Stream a poor choice for, say, intermediate I/O operations.

Answer 3

I'd say its parallelization that is so easy to use. Try iterating over millions of entries in parallel with a for loop. We go to many cpus, not faster; so the easier it is to run in parallel the better, and with Streams this is a breeze.

What I like a lot is the verbosity they offer. It takes little time to understand what they actually do and produce as opposed of how they do it.

Answer 4

1. You realized incorrectly: parallel operations use Streams, not Optionals.

2. You can define methods working with streams: taking them as parameters, returning them, etc. You can't define a method which takes a loop as a parameter. This allows a complicated stream operation once and using it many times. Note that Java has a drawback here: your methods have to be called as someMethod(stream) as opposed to stream's own stream.someMethod(), so mixing them complicates reading: try seeing the order of operations in

   myMethod2(myMethod(stream.transform(...)).filter(...))
   

   Many other languages (C#, Kotlin, Scala, etc) allow some form of "extension methods".

3. Even when you only need sequential operations, and don't want to reuse them, so that you could use either streams or loops, simple operations on streams may correspond to quite complex changes in the loops.

Answer 5

You loop over a sequence (array, collection, input, ...) because you want to apply some function to the elements of the sequence.

Streams give you the ability to compose functions on sequence elements and allow to implement most common functions (e.g. mapping, filtering, finding, sorting, collecting, ...) independent of a concrete case.

Therefore given some looping task in most cases you can express it with less code using Streams, i.e. you gain readability.