So I noticed that Kotlin tends to have several ways of doing the same thing1. Sometimes these are actually identical, sometimes there are subtle differences.
That makes things hard for me.
Let's take this trivial example.
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| @Test | |
| fun testEmpty() { | |
| val emptyList: List<String> = listOf() | |
| val anotherEmptyList: List<String> = emptyList() | |
| assertThat(emptyList).isEmpty() | |
| assertThat(anotherEmptyList).isEmpty() | |
| assertThat(emptyList).isEqualTo(anotherEmptyList); | |
| assertThat(emptyList).isSameAs(anotherEmptyList); | |
| } |
There is no difference. The one thing you could mention is that emptyList() more accurately conveys what you are trying to do.
There's something similar in Java. Collections.emptyList() versus List.of(). The comments on [2] seems to be very interesting.
In Java one could argue that List.of() is new, so should be used. And we could assume that the Language Architects in Java wouldn't add a List.of() for no reason.
References
- [1] Kotlinlanguage Reference - emptyList
- https://kotlinlang.org/api/core/kotlin-stdlib/kotlin.collections/empty-list.html
- [2] StackOverflow - List.of() or Collections.emptyList()
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39400238/list-of-or-collections-emptylist
