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.Net Data structures: ArrayList, List, HashTable, Dictionary, SortedList, SortedDictionary -- Speed, memory, and when to use each?

Asked 2008-09-24T17:47:27.897
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.NET has a lot of complex data structures. Unfortunately, some of them are quite similar and I'm not always sure when to use one and when to use another. Most of my C# and VB books talk about them to a certain extent, but they never really go into any real detail.

What's the difference between Array, ArrayList, List, Hashtable, Dictionary, SortedList, and SortedDictionary?

Which ones are enumerable (IList -- can do 'foreach' loops)? Which ones use key/value pairs (IDict)?

What about memory footprint? Insertion speed? Retrieval speed?

Are there any other data structures worth mentioning?

I'm still searching for more details on memory usage and speed (Big-O notation)

c# .net vb.net arrays data-structures
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I sympathise with the question - I too found (find?) the choice bewildering, so I set out scientifically to see which data structure is the fastest (I did the test using VB, but I imagine C# would be the same, since both languages do the same thing at the CLR level). You can see some benchmarking results conducted by me here (there's also some discussion of which data type is best to use in which circumstances).

answered 2011-11-11T08:56:14.557

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