Scala list concatenation, ::: vs ++

Question

Is there any difference between ::: and ++ for concatenating lists in Scala?

scala> List(1,2,3) ++ List(4,5)
res0: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

scala> List(1,2,3) ::: List(4,5)
res1: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

scala> res0 == res1
res2: Boolean = true

From the documentation it looks like ++ is more general whereas ::: is List-specific. Is the latter provided because it's used in other functional languages?

Answer 1

Legacy. List was originally defined to be functional-languages-looking:

1 :: 2 :: Nil // a list
list1 ::: list2  // concatenation of two lists

list match {
  case head :: tail => "non-empty"
  case Nil          => "empty"
}

Of course, Scala evolved other collections, in an ad-hoc manner. When 2.8 came out, the collections were redesigned for maximum code reuse and consistent API, so that you can use ++ to concatenate any two collections -- and even iterators. List, however, got to keep its original operators, aside from one or two which got deprecated.

Answer 2

Always use :::. There are two reasons: efficiency and type safety.

Efficiency

x ::: y ::: z is faster than x ++ y ++ z, because ::: is right associative. x ::: y ::: z is parsed as x ::: (y ::: z), which is algorithmically faster than (x ::: y) ::: z (the latter requires O(|x|) more steps).

Type safety

With ::: you can only concatenate two Lists. With ++ you can append any collection to List, which is terrible:

scala> List(1, 2, 3) ++ "ab"
res0: List[AnyVal] = List(1, 2, 3, a, b)

++ is also easy to mix up with +:

scala> List(1, 2, 3) + "ab"
res1: String = List(1, 2, 3)ab

Answer 3

::: works only with lists, while ++ can be used with any traversable. In the current implementation (2.9.0), ++ falls back on ::: if the argument is also a List.

Answer 4

A different point is that the first sentence is parsed as:

scala> List(1,2,3).++(List(4,5))
res0: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Whereas the second example is parsed as:

scala> List(4,5).:::(List(1,2,3))
res1: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

So if you are using macros, you should take care.

Besides, ++ for two lists is calling ::: but with more overhead because it is asking for an implicit value to have a builder from List to List. But microbenchmarks did not prove anything useful in that sense, I guess that the compiler optimizes such calls.

Micro-Benchmarks after warming up.

scala>def time(a: => Unit): Long = { val t = System.currentTimeMillis; a; System.currentTimeMillis - t}
scala>def average(a: () => Long) = (for(i<-1 to 100) yield a()).sum/100

scala>average (() => time { (List[Int]() /: (1 to 1000)) { case (l, e) => l ++ List(e) } })
res1: Long = 46
scala>average (() => time { (List[Int]() /: (1 to 1000)) { case (l, e) => l ::: List(e ) } })
res2: Long = 46

As Daniel C. Sobrai said, you can append the content of any collection to a list using ++, whereas with ::: you can only concatenate lists.