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I prefer Python over Scala. But, as Spark is natively written in Scala, I was expecting my code to run faster in the Scala than the Python version for obvious reasons.
With that assumption, I thought to learn & write the Scala version of some very common preprocessing code for some 1 GB of data. Data is picked from the SpringLeaf competition on Kaggle. Just to give an overview of the data (it contains 1936 dimensions and 145232 rows). Data is composed of various types e.g. int, float, string, boolean. I am using 6 cores out of 8 for Spark processing; that's why I used minPartitions=6 so that every core has something to process.
Scala Code
val input = sc.textFile("train.csv", minPartitions=6)
val input2 = input.mapPartitionsWithIndex { (idx, iter) =>
if (idx == 0) iter.drop(1) else iter }
val delim1 = "\001"
def separateCols(line: String): Array[String] = {
val line2 = line.replaceAll("true", "1")
val line3 = line2.replaceAll("false", "0")
val vals: Array[String] = line3.split(",")
for((x,i) <- vals.view.zipWithIndex) {
vals(i) = "VAR_%04d".format(i) + delim1 + x
}
vals
}
val input3 = input2.flatMap(separateCols)
def toKeyVal(line: String): (String, String) = {
val vals = line.split(delim1)
(vals(0), vals(1))
}
val input4 = input3.map(toKeyVal)
def valsConcat(val1: String, val2: String): String = {
val1 + "," + val2
}
val input5 = input4.reduceByKey(valsConcat)
input5.saveAsTextFile("output")
Python Code
input = sc.textFile('train.csv', minPartitions=6)
DELIM_1 = '\001'
def drop_first_line(index, itr):
if index == 0:
return iter(list(itr)[1:])
else:
return itr
input2 = input.mapPartitionsWithIndex(drop_first_line)
def separate_cols(line):
line = line.replace('true', '1').replace('false', '0')
vals = line.split(',')
vals2 = ['VAR_%04d%s%s' %(e, DELIM_1, val.strip('\"'))
for e, val in enumerate(vals)]
return vals2
input3 = input2.flatMap(separate_cols)
def to_key_val(kv):
key, val = kv.split(DELIM_1)
return (key, val)
input4 = input3.map(to_key_val)
def vals_concat(v1, v2):
return v1 + ',' + v2
input5 = input4.reduceByKey(vals_concat)
input5.saveAsTextFile('output')
Scala Performance
Stage 0 (38 mins), Stage 1 (18 sec)
Python Performance
Stage 0 (11 mins), Stage 1 (7 sec)
Both produces different DAG visualization graphs (due to which both pictures show different stage 0 functions for Scala (map) and Python (reduceByKey))
But, essentially both code tries to transform data into (dimension_id, string of list of values) RDD and save to disk. The output will be used to compute various statistics for each dimension.
Performance wise, Scala code for this real data like this seems to run 4 times slower than the Python version.
Good news for me is that it gave me good motivation to stay with Python. Bad news is I didn't quite understand why?
The original answer discussing the code can be found below.
First of all, you have to distinguish between different types of API, each with its own performance considerations.
RDD API
(pure Python structures with JVM based orchestration)
This is the component which will be most affected by the performance of the Python code and the details of PySpark implementation. While Python performance is rather unlikely to be a problem, there at least few factors you have to consider:
Overhead of JVM communication. Practically all data that comes to and from Python executor has to be passed through a socket and a JVM worker. While this is a relatively efficient local communication it is still not free.
Process-based executors (Python) versus thread based (single JVM multiple threads) executors (Scala). Each Python executor runs in its own process. As a side effect, it provides stronger isolation than its JVM counterpart and some control over executor lifecycle but potentially significantly higher memory usage:
interpreter memory footprint
footprint of the loaded libraries
less efficient broadcasting (each process requires its own copy of a broadcast)
Performance of Python code itself. Generally speaking Scala is faster than Python but it will vary on task to task. Moreover you have multiple options including JITs like Numba, C extensions (Cython) or specialized libraries like Theano. Finally, if you don't use ML / MLlib (or simply NumPy stack), consider using PyPy as an alternative interpreter. See SPARK-3094.
PySpark configuration provides the spark.python.worker.reuse option which can be used to choose between forking Python process for each task and reusing existing process. The latter option seems to be useful to avoid expensive garbage collection (it is more an impression than a result of systematic tests), while the former one (default) is optimal for in case of expensive broadcasts and imports.
Reference counting, used as the first line garbage collection method in CPython, works pretty well with typical Spark workloads (stream-like processing, no reference cycles) and reduces the risk of long GC pauses.
MLlib
(mixed Python and JVM execution)
Basic considerations are pretty much the same as before with a few additional issues. While basic structures used with MLlib are plain Python RDD objects, all algorithms are executed directly using Scala.
It means an additional cost of converting Python objects to Scala objects and the other way around, increased memory usage and some additional limitations we'll cover later.
As of now (Spark 2.x), the RDD-based API is in a maintenance mode and is scheduled to be removed in Spark 3.0.
DataFrame API and Spark ML
(JVM execution with Python code limited to the driver)
These are probably the best choice for standard data processing tasks. Since Python code is mostly limited to high-level logical operations on the driver, there should be no performance difference between Python and Scala.
A single exception is usage of row-wise Python UDFs which are significantly less efficient than their Scala equivalents. While there is some chance for improvements (there has been substantial development in Spark 2.0.0), the biggest limitation is full roundtrip between internal representation (JVM) and Python interpreter. If possible, you should favor a composition of built-in expressions (example. Python UDF behavior has been improved in Spark 2.0.0, but it is still suboptimal compared to native execution.
This may improved in the future has improved significantly with introduction of the vectorized UDFs (SPARK-21190 and further extensions), which uses Arrow Streaming for efficient data exchange with zero-copy deserialization. For most applications their secondary overheads can be just ignored.
Also be sure to avoid unnecessary passing data between DataFrames and RDDs. This requires expensive serialization and deserialization, not to mention data transfer to and from Python interpreter.
It is worth noting that Py4J calls have pretty high latency. This includes simple calls like:
from pyspark.sql.functions import col
col("foo")
Usually, it shouldn't matter (overhead is constant and doesn't depend on the amount of data) but in the case of soft real-time applications, you may consider caching/reusing Java wrappers.
GraphX and Spark DataSets
As for now (Spark 1.6 2.1) neither one provides PySpark API so you can say that PySpark is infinitely worse than Scala.
GraphX
In practice, GraphX development stopped almost completely and the project is currently in the maintenance mode with related JIRA tickets closed as won't fix. GraphFrames library provides an alternative graph processing library with Python bindings.
Dataset
Subjectively speaking there is not much place for statically typed Datasets in Python and even if there was the current Scala implementation is too simplistic and doesn't provide the same performance benefits as DataFrame.
Streaming
From what I've seen so far, I would strongly recommend using Scala over Python. It may change in the future if PySpark gets support for structured streams but right now Scala API seems to be much more robust, comprehensive and efficient. My experience is quite limited.
Structured streaming in Spark 2.x seem to reduce the gap between languages but for now it is still in its early days. Nevertheless, RDD based API is already referenced as "legacy streaming" in the Databricks Documentation (date of access 2017-03-03)) so it reasonable to expect further unification efforts.
Non-performance considerations
Feature parity
Not all Spark features are exposed through PySpark API. Be sure to check if the parts you need are already implemented and try to understand possible limitations.
It is particularly important when you use MLlib and similar mixed contexts (see Calling Java/Scala function from a task). To be fair some parts of the PySpark API, like mllib.linalg, provides a more comprehensive set of methods than Scala.
API design
The PySpark API closely reflects its Scala counterpart and as such is not exactly Pythonic. It means that it is pretty easy to map between languages but at the same time, Python code can be significantly harder to understand.
Complex architecture
PySpark data flow is relatively complex compared to pure JVM execution. It is much harder to reason about PySpark programs or debug. Moreover at least basic understanding of Scala and JVM in general is pretty much a must have.
Spark 2.x and beyond
Ongoing shift towards Dataset API, with frozen RDD API brings both opportunities and challenges for Python users. While high level parts of the API are much easier to expose in Python, the more advanced features are pretty much impossible to be used directly.
Moreover native Python functions continue to be second class citizen in the SQL world. Hopefully this will improve in the future with Apache Arrow serialization (current efforts target data collection but UDF serde is a long term goal).
For projects strongly depending on the Python codebase, pure Python alternatives (like Dask or Ray) could be an interesting alternative.
It doesn't have to be one vs. the other
The Spark DataFrame (SQL, Dataset) API provides an elegant way to integrate Scala/Java code in PySpark application. You can use DataFrames to expose data to a native JVM code and read back the results. I've explained some options somewhere else and you can find a working example of Python-Scala roundtrip in How to use a Scala class inside Pyspark.
It can be further augmented by introducing User Defined Types (see How to define schema for custom type in Spark SQL?).
What is wrong with code provided in the question
(Disclaimer: Pythonista point of view. Most likely I've missed some Scala tricks)
First of all, there is one part in your code which doesn't make sense at all. If you already have (key, value) pairs created using zipWithIndex or enumerate what is the point in creating string just to split it right afterwards? flatMap doesn't work recursively so you can simply yield tuples and skip following map whatsoever.
Another part I find problematic is reduceByKey. Generally speaking, reduceByKey is useful if applying aggregate function can reduce the amount of data that has to be shuffled. Since you simply concatenate strings there is nothing to gain here. Ignoring low-level stuff, like the number of references, the amount of data you have to transfer is exactly the same as for groupByKey.
Normally I wouldn't dwell on that, but as far as I can tell it is a bottleneck in your Scala code. Joining strings on JVM is a rather expensive operation (see for example: Is string concatenation in scala as costly as it is in Java?). It means that something like this _.reduceByKey((v1: String, v2: String) => v1 + ',' + v2) which is equivalent to input4.reduceByKey(valsConcat) in your code is not a good idea.
If you want to avoid groupByKey you can try to use aggregateByKey with StringBuilder. Something similar to this should do the trick:
rdd.aggregateByKey(new StringBuilder)(
(acc, e) => {
if(!acc.isEmpty) acc.append(",").append(e)
else acc.append(e)
},
(acc1, acc2) => {
if(acc1.isEmpty | acc2.isEmpty) acc1.addString(acc2)
else acc1.append(",").addString(acc2)
}
)
but I doubt it is worth all the fuss.
Keeping the above in mind, I've rewritten your code as follows:
Scala:
val input = sc.textFile("train.csv", 6).mapPartitionsWithIndex{
(idx, iter) => if (idx == 0) iter.drop(1) else iter
}
val pairs = input.flatMap(line => line.split(",").zipWithIndex.map{
case ("true", i) => (i, "1")
case ("false", i) => (i, "0")
case p => p.swap
})
val result = pairs.groupByKey.map{
case (k, vals) => {
val valsString = vals.mkString(",")
s"$k,$valsString"
}
}
result.saveAsTextFile("scalaout")
Python:
def drop_first_line(index, itr):
if index == 0:
return iter(list(itr)[1:])
else:
return itr
def separate_cols(line):
line = line.replace('true', '1').replace('false', '0')
vals = line.split(',')
for (i, x) in enumerate(vals):
yield (i, x)
input = (sc
.textFile('train.csv', minPartitions=6)
.mapPartitionsWithIndex(drop_first_line))
pairs = input.flatMap(separate_cols)
result = (pairs
.groupByKey()
.map(lambda kv: "{0},{1}".format(kv[0], ",".join(kv[1]))))
result.saveAsTextFile("pythonout")
Results
In local[6] mode (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1245 V2 # 3.40GHz) with 4GB memory per executor it takes (n = 3):
Scala - mean: 250.00s, stdev: 12.49
Python - mean: 246.66s, stdev: 1.15
I am pretty sure that most of that time is spent on shuffling, serializing, deserializing and other secondary tasks. Just for fun, here's naive single-threaded code in Python that performs the same task on this machine in less than a minute:
def go():
with open("train.csv") as fr:
lines = [
line.replace('true', '1').replace('false', '0').split(",")
for line in fr]
return zip(*lines[1:])
I have:
val rdd1: RDD[myClass]
it has been initialized, i checked while debugging all the members have got thier default values
If i do
rdd1.foreach(x=>x.modifier())
where modifier is a member function of myClass which modifies some of the member variables
After executing this if i check the values inside the RDD they have not been modified.
Can someone explain what's going on here?
And is it possible to make sure the values are modified inside the RDD?
EDIT:
class myClass(var id:String,var sessions: Buffer[Long],var avgsession: Long) {
def calcAvg(){
// calculate avg by summing over sessions and dividing by legnth
// Store this average in avgsession
}
}
The avgsession attribute is not updating if i do
myrdd.foreach(x=>x.calcAvg())
RDD are immutable, calling a mutating method on the objects it contains will not have any effect.
The way to obtain the result you want is to produce new copies of MyClass instead of modifying the instance:
case class MyClass(id:String, avgsession: Long) {
def modifier(a: Int):MyClass =
this.copy(avgsession = this.avgsession + a)
}
Now you still cannot update rdd1, but you can obtain rdd2 that will contain the updated instances:
rdd2 = rdd1.map (_.modifier(18) )
The answer to this question is slightly more nuanced than the original accepted answer here. The original answer is correct only with respect to data that is not cached in memory. RDD data that is cached in memory can be mutated in memory as well and the mutations will remain even though the RDD is supposed to be immutable. Consider the following example:
val rdd = sc.parallelize(Seq(new mutable.HashSet[Int]()))
rdd.foreach(_+=1)
rdd.collect.foreach(println)
If you run that example you will get Set() as the result just like the original answer states.
However if you were to run the exact same thing with a cache call:
val rdd = sc.parallelize(Seq(new mutable.HashSet[Int]()))
rdd.cache
rdd.foreach(_+=1)
rdd.collect.foreach(println)
Now the result will print as Set(1). So it depends on whether the data is being cached in memory. If spark is recomputing from source or reading from a serialized copy on disk, then it will always reset back to the original object and appear to be immutable but if it's not loading from a serialized form then the mutations will in fact stick.
Objects are immutable. By using map, you can iterate over the rdd and return a new one.
val rdd2 = rdd1.map(x=>x.modifier())
I have observed that code like yours will work after calling RDD.persist when running in spark/yarn. It is probably unsupported/accidental behavior and you should avoid it - but it is a workaround that may help in a pinch. I'm running version 1.5.0.
I want to use graphx. For now I just launchs it locally.
I've got NullPointerException in these few lines. First println works well, and second one fails.
..........
val graph: Graph[Int, Int] = Graph(users, relationships)
println("graph.inDegrees = " + graph.inDegrees.count) // this line works well
graph.mapVertices((id, v) => {
println("graph.inDegrees = " + graph.inDegrees.count) // but this one fails
42 // doesn't mean anything
}).vertices.collect
And it does not matter which method of 'graph' object I call. But 'graph' is not null inside 'mapVertices'.
Exception failure in TID 2 on host localhost:
java.lang.NullPointerException
org.apache.spark.graphx.impl.GraphImpl.mapReduceTriplets(GraphImpl.scala:168)
org.apache.spark.graphx.GraphOps.degreesRDD(GraphOps.scala:72)
org.apache.spark.graphx.GraphOps.inDegrees$lzycompute(GraphOps.scala:49)
org.apache.spark.graphx.GraphOps.inDegrees(GraphOps.scala:48)
ololo.MyOwnObject$$anonfun$main$1.apply$mcIJI$sp(Twitter.scala:42)
Reproduced using GraphX 2.10 on Spark 1.0.2. I'll give you a workaround and then explain what I think is happening. This works for me:
val c = graph.inDegrees.count
graph.mapVertices((id, v) => {
println("graph.inDegrees = " + c)
}).vertices.collect
In general, Spark gets prickly when you try to access an entire RDD or other distributed object (like a Graph) in code that's intended to execute in parallel on a single partition, like the function you're passing into mapVertices. But it's also usually a bad idea even when you can get it to work. (As a separate matter, as you've seen, when it doesn't work it tends to result in really unhelpful behavior.)
The vertices of a Graph are represented as an RDD, and the function you pass into mapVertices runs locally in the appropriate partitions, where it is given access to local vertex data: id and v. You really don't want the entire graph to be copied to each partition. In this case you just need to broadcast a scalar to each partition, so pulling it out solved the problem and the broadcast is really cheap.
There are tricks in the Spark APIs for accessing more complex objects in such a situation, but if you use them carelessly they will destroy your performance because they'll tend to introduce lots of communication. Often people are tempted to use them because they don't understand the computation model, rather than because they really need to, although that does happen too.
Spark does not support nested RDDs or user-defined functions that refer to other RDDs, hence the NullPointerException; see this thread on the spark-users mailing list. In this case, you're attempting to call count() on a Graph (which performs an action on a Spark RDD) from inside of a mapVertices() transformation, leading to a NullPointerException when mapVertices() attempts to access data structures that are only callable by the Spark driver.
In a nutshell, only the Spark driver can launch new Spark jobs; you can't call actions on RDDs from inside of other RDD actions.
See https://stackoverflow.com/a/23793399/590203 for another example of this issue.
When using Scala in Spark, whenever I dump the results out using saveAsTextFile, it seems to split the output into multiple parts. I'm just passing a parameter(path) to it.
val year = sc.textFile("apat63_99.txt").map(_.split(",")(1)).flatMap(_.split(",")).map((_,1)).reduceByKey((_+_)).map(_.swap)
year.saveAsTextFile("year")
Does the number of outputs correspond to the number of reducers it uses?
Does this mean the output is compressed?
I know I can combine the output together using bash, but is there an option to store the output in a single text file, without splitting?? I looked at the API docs, but it doesn't say much about this.
The reason it saves it as multiple files is because the computation is distributed. If the output is small enough such that you think you can fit it on one machine, then you can end your program with
val arr = year.collect()
And then save the resulting array as a file, Another way would be to use a custom partitioner, partitionBy, and make it so everything goes to one partition though that isn't advisable because you won't get any parallelization.
If you require the file to be saved with saveAsTextFile you can use coalesce(1,true).saveAsTextFile(). This basically means do the computation then coalesce to 1 partition. You can also use repartition(1) which is just a wrapper for coalesce with the shuffle argument set to true. Looking through the source of RDD.scala is how I figured most of this stuff out, you should take a look.
For those working with a larger dataset:
rdd.collect() should not be used in this case as it will collect all data as an Array in the driver, which is the easiest way to get out of memory.
rdd.coalesce(1).saveAsTextFile() should also not be used as the parallelism of upstream stages will be lost to be performed on a single node, where data will be stored from.
rdd.coalesce(1, shuffle = true).saveAsTextFile() is the best simple option as it will keep the processing of upstream tasks parallel and then only perform the shuffle to one node (rdd.repartition(1).saveAsTextFile() is an exact synonym).
rdd.saveAsSingleTextFile() as provided bellow additionally allows one to store the rdd in a single file with a specific name while keeping the parallelism properties of rdd.coalesce(1, shuffle = true).saveAsTextFile().
Something that can be inconvenient with rdd.coalesce(1, shuffle = true).saveAsTextFile("path/to/file.txt") is that it actually produces a file whose path is path/to/file.txt/part-00000 and not path/to/file.txt.
The following solution rdd.saveAsSingleTextFile("path/to/file.txt") will actually produce a file whose path is path/to/file.txt:
package com.whatever.package
import org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.{FileSystem, FileUtil, Path}
import org.apache.hadoop.io.compress.CompressionCodec
object SparkHelper {
// This is an implicit class so that saveAsSingleTextFile can be attached to
// SparkContext and be called like this: sc.saveAsSingleTextFile
implicit class RDDExtensions(val rdd: RDD[String]) extends AnyVal {
def saveAsSingleTextFile(path: String): Unit =
saveAsSingleTextFileInternal(path, None)
def saveAsSingleTextFile(path: String, codec: Class[_ <: CompressionCodec]): Unit =
saveAsSingleTextFileInternal(path, Some(codec))
private def saveAsSingleTextFileInternal(
path: String, codec: Option[Class[_ <: CompressionCodec]]
): Unit = {
// The interface with hdfs:
val hdfs = FileSystem.get(rdd.sparkContext.hadoopConfiguration)
// Classic saveAsTextFile in a temporary folder:
hdfs.delete(new Path(s"$path.tmp"), true) // to make sure it's not there already
codec match {
case Some(codec) => rdd.saveAsTextFile(s"$path.tmp", codec)
case None => rdd.saveAsTextFile(s"$path.tmp")
}
// Merge the folder of resulting part-xxxxx into one file:
hdfs.delete(new Path(path), true) // to make sure it's not there already
FileUtil.copyMerge(
hdfs, new Path(s"$path.tmp"),
hdfs, new Path(path),
true, rdd.sparkContext.hadoopConfiguration, null
)
// Working with Hadoop 3?: https://stackoverflow.com/a/50545815/9297144
hdfs.delete(new Path(s"$path.tmp"), true)
}
}
}
which can be used this way:
import com.whatever.package.SparkHelper.RDDExtensions
rdd.saveAsSingleTextFile("path/to/file.txt")
// Or if the produced file is to be compressed:
import org.apache.hadoop.io.compress.GzipCodec
rdd.saveAsSingleTextFile("path/to/file.txt.gz", classOf[GzipCodec])
This snippet:
First stores the rdd with rdd.saveAsTextFile("path/to/file.txt") in a temporary folder path/to/file.txt.tmp as if we didn't want to store data in one file (which keeps the processing of upstream tasks parallel)
And then only, using the hadoop file system api, we proceed with the merge (FileUtil.copyMerge()) of the different output files to create our final output single file path/to/file.txt.
You could call coalesce(1) and then saveAsTextFile() - but it might be a bad idea if you have a lot of data. Separate files per split are generated just like in Hadoop in order to let separate mappers and reducers write to different files. Having a single output file is only a good idea if you have very little data, in which case you could do collect() as well, as #aaronman said.
As others have mentioned, you can collect or coalesce your data set to force Spark to produce a single file. But this also limits the number of Spark tasks that can work on your dataset in parallel. I prefer to let it create a hundred files in the output HDFS directory, then use hadoop fs -getmerge /hdfs/dir /local/file.txt to extract the results into a single file in the local filesystem. This makes the most sense when your output is a relatively small report, of course.
In Spark 1.6.1 the format is as shown below. It creates a single output file.It is best practice to use it if the output is small enough to handle.Basically what it does is that it returns a new RDD that is reduced into numPartitions partitions.If you're doing a drastic coalesce, e.g. to numPartitions = 1, this may result in your computation taking place on fewer nodes than you like (e.g. one node in the case of numPartitions = 1)
pair_result.coalesce(1).saveAsTextFile("/app/data/")
You can call repartition() and follow this way:
val year = sc.textFile("apat63_99.txt").map(_.split(",")(1)).flatMap(_.split(",")).map((_,1)).reduceByKey((_+_)).map(_.swap)
var repartitioned = year.repartition(1)
repartitioned.saveAsTextFile("C:/Users/TheBhaskarDas/Desktop/wc_spark00")
You will be able to do it in the next version of Spark, in the current version 1.0.0 it's not possible unless you do it manually somehow, for example, like you mentioned, with a bash script call.
I also want to mention that the documentation clearly states that users should be careful when calling coalesce with a real small number of partitions . this can cause upstream partitions to inherit this number of partitions.
I would not recommend using coalesce(1) unless really required.
Here's my answer to output a single file. I just added coalesce(1)
val year = sc.textFile("apat63_99.txt")
.map(_.split(",")(1))
.flatMap(_.split(","))
.map((_,1))
.reduceByKey((_+_)).map(_.swap)
year.saveAsTextFile("year")
Code:
year.coalesce(1).saveAsTextFile("year")
In Scala there is a Stream class that is very much like an iterator. The topic Difference between Iterator and Stream in Scala? offers some insights into the similarities and differences between the two.
Seeing how to use a stream is pretty simple but I don't have very many common use-cases where I would use a stream instead of other artifacts.
The ideas I have right now:
If you need to make use of an infinite series. But this does not seem like a common use-case to me so it doesn't fit my criteria. (Please correct me if it is common and I just have a blind spot)
If you have a series of data where each element needs to be computed but that you may want to reuse several times. This is weak because I could just load it into a list which is conceptually easier to follow for a large subset of the developer population.
Perhaps there is a large set of data or a computationally expensive series and there is a high probability that the items you need will not require visiting all of the elements. But in this case an Iterator would be a good match unless you need to do several searches, in that case you could use a list as well even if it would be slightly less efficient.
There is a complex series of data that needs to be reused. Again a list could be used here. Although in this case both cases would be equally difficult to use and a Stream would be a better fit since not all elements need to be loaded. But again not that common... or is it?
So have I missed any big uses? Or is it a developer preference for the most part?
Thanks
The main difference between a Stream and an Iterator is that the latter is mutable and "one-shot", so to speak, while the former is not. Iterator has a better memory footprint than Stream, but the fact that it is mutable can be inconvenient.
Take this classic prime number generator, for instance:
def primeStream(s: Stream[Int]): Stream[Int] =
Stream.cons(s.head, primeStream(s.tail filter { _ % s.head != 0 }))
val primes = primeStream(Stream.from(2))
It can be easily be written with an Iterator as well, but an Iterator won't keep the primes computed so far.
So, one important aspect of a Stream is that you can pass it to other functions without having it duplicated first, or having to generate it again and again.
As for expensive computations/infinite lists, these things can be done with Iterator as well. Infinite lists are actually quite useful -- you just don't know it because you didn't have it, so you have seen algorithms that are more complex than strictly necessary just to deal with enforced finite sizes.
In addition to Daniel's answer, keep in mind that Stream is useful for short-circuiting evaluations. For example, suppose I have a huge set of functions that take String and return Option[String], and I want to keep executing them until one of them works:
val stringOps = List(
(s:String) => if (s.length>10) Some(s.length.toString) else None ,
(s:String) => if (s.length==0) Some("empty") else None ,
(s:String) => if (s.indexOf(" ")>=0) Some(s.trim) else None
);
Well, I certainly don't want to execute the entire list, and there isn't any handy method on List that says, "treat these as functions and execute them until one of them returns something other than None". What to do? Perhaps this:
def transform(input: String, ops: List[String=>Option[String]]) = {
ops.toStream.map( _(input) ).find(_ isDefined).getOrElse(None)
}
This takes a list and treats it as a Stream (which doesn't actually evaluate anything), then defines a new Stream that is a result of applying the functions (but that doesn't evaluate anything either yet), then searches for the first one which is defined--and here, magically, it looks back and realizes it has to apply the map, and get the right data from the original list--and then unwraps it from Option[Option[String]] to Option[String] using getOrElse.
Here's an example:
scala> transform("This is a really long string",stringOps)
res0: Option[String] = Some(28)
scala> transform("",stringOps)
res1: Option[String] = Some(empty)
scala> transform(" hi ",stringOps)
res2: Option[String] = Some(hi)
scala> transform("no-match",stringOps)
res3: Option[String] = None
But does it work? If we put a println into our functions so we can tell if they're called, we get
val stringOps = List(
(s:String) => {println("1"); if (s.length>10) Some(s.length.toString) else None },
(s:String) => {println("2"); if (s.length==0) Some("empty") else None },
(s:String) => {println("3"); if (s.indexOf(" ")>=0) Some(s.trim) else None }
);
// (transform is the same)
scala> transform("This is a really long string",stringOps)
1
res0: Option[String] = Some(28)
scala> transform("no-match",stringOps)
1
2
3
res1: Option[String] = None
(This is with Scala 2.8; 2.7's implementation will sometimes overshoot by one, unfortunately. And note that you do accumulate a long list of None as your failures accrue, but presumably this is inexpensive compared to your true computation here.)
I could imagine, that if you poll some device in real time, a Stream is more convenient.
Think of an GPS tracker, which returns the actual position if you ask it. You can't precompute the location where you will be in 5 minutes. You might use it for a few minutes only to actualize a path in OpenStreetMap or you might use it for an expedition over six months in a desert or the rain forest.
Or a digital thermometer or other kinds of sensors which repeatedly return new data, as long as the hardware is alive and turned on - a log file filter could be another example.
Stream is to Iterator as immutable.List is to mutable.List. Favouring immutability prevents a class of bugs, occasionally at the cost of performance.
scalac itself isn't immune to these problems: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.scala.internals/2831
As Daniel points out, favouring laziness over strictness can simplify algorithms and make it easier to compose them.