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Comment by tmail21 | Hacker News Reader

Looks like there is some distinction between Mutable, Read-only View and Immutable.

According to this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33727657/kotlin-and-immut... Kotlin does not support true immutability.

For immutability to be practical one would need to implement structural sharing in their collections otherwise copying would be prohibitively expensive.

This Java library seems to be trying to implement this. http://www.vavr.io/

Again, I am not saying that Kotlin does not support immutability, just trying to get to the bottom of the reality of it.

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I get your point now. Yes, it is read-only, not immutable. For me, I only need read-only. I think kotlin wasn't meant to be pure functional. I see it as object oriented with some functional programming.

out of curiosity, what cases will you use an immutable collection instead of a read-only? I cannot imagine any use case where immutable is a gain over read-only.

"Read-only" would not implement structural sharing.

Consider the situation where you had a linked list with 10,000 elements and you wanted to return a new list with one new element added to the 'head' of the list. With "read-only" you would literally have to make a new linked list with 10,001 elements which would kill performance.

While semantically correct, immutability via deep-copying is very impractical. So, immutability (of Collections in particular) needs to be implemented via structural sharing of elements.

In the above example, with structural sharing, the new list would have the new element and inside would point to the old 10,000 element list but the whole 'structure' would appear to you as just a normal list.

Sorry, I don't see the difference. With read-only you can create a new object which is the first element of the list and also points to the rest of the list. Instead of an structure you have an "immutable" object.

Yes, but the resulting object is not a "List" and hence would not inter-operate with any function that took a List as input.

In essence if the original object implements a List _interface_, then the new one should as well. If you do all of this, then you've essentially implemented immutability and structural sharing. But then you have to do this for 10 other Collection types as well.

Now, you could do all this, but I could do it as well and do it differently. Then my function which took MyList as argument would not interoperate with your function that wants to pass YourList as argument.

Something as fundamental as an (immutable) collection needs to be standardized so that all functions can take these and return them and thus compose easily.

This is the case with languages that implement immutability like Elixir, Haskell etc.

There are already interfaces for Immutable collections in kotlin. And all the functional operators as map, filter, etc, returns them. But it is not true immutability as you said, because under the hood they are normal list. They aren't even read-only objects, but you encapsulate this behaviour under an interface.

You now have https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.collections.immutable

Cool.

This needs to be built into the language or somehow standardized by the community.

With lack of standardization of immutable collections, there would be lots of different ways that libraries would implement immutability. This would result in losing one of the main benefits of functional programming (i.e. awesome composability).

Well, that is part of the Kotlin project itself, so I assume it is or will be built in, should the proposal succeed.

Not sure about the governance model of Kotlin. Hopefully it succeeds.

This is already in the language. It is just an interface which makes the common lists only visible as immutable objects. But inside they are a normal list. And in this case the object is read-only, not immutable, as we were discussing in the other comment thread.

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