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What (if any) performance advantages are offered by using iterators. It seems like the 'Right Way' to solve many problems, but does it create faster/more memory-conscious code? I'm thinking specifically in Python, but don't restrict answers to just that.
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Benefits of Iterators. Use of an iterator simplifies the code and makes it general. Benefits of using this iterator API include: treats variables of all types, sizes, and shapes uniformly, whether they fit in memory or not, even if a single row won't fit in memory.
Iterator and for-each loop are faster than simple for loop for collections with no random access, while in collections which allows random access there is no performance change with for-each loop/for loop/iterator.
Iterators have several advantages: Cleaner code. Iterators can work with infinite sequences. Iterators save resources.
9 Answers. Show activity on this post. Iterator is faster for collections with no random access (e.g. TreeSet, HashMap, LinkedList). For arrays and ArrayLists, performance differences should be negligible.
There's actually a very good mail on the python mailing list about this: Iterators vs Lists. It's a bit dated (from 2003), but as far as I know, it's still valid.
Here's the summary:
For small datasets, iterator and list based approaches have similar performance. For larger datasets, iterators save both time and space.
What I would draw from it is this: iterators are to be preferred over loading data into a list if possible. But unless you have a big dataset, don't contort your code to make something that should fit in a list to work with an iterator.
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