In Java 8, why is the default capacity of ArrayList now zero?

As I recall, before Java 8, the default capacity of ArrayList was 10.

Surprisingly, the comment on the default (void) constructor still says: Constructs an empty list with an initial capacity of ten.

From ArrayList.java:

/**
 * Shared empty array instance used for default sized empty instances. We
 * distinguish this from EMPTY_ELEMENTDATA to know how much to inflate when
 * first element is added.
 */
private static final Object[] DEFAULTCAPACITY_EMPTY_ELEMENTDATA = {};

...

/**
 * Constructs an empty list with an initial capacity of ten.
 */
public ArrayList() {
    this.elementData = DEFAULTCAPACITY_EMPTY_ELEMENTDATA;
}

Technically, it's 10, not zero, if you admit for a lazy initialisation of the backing array. See:

public boolean add(E e) {
    ensureCapacityInternal(size + 1);
    elementData[size++] = e;
    return true;
}

private void ensureCapacityInternal(int minCapacity) {
    if (elementData == DEFAULTCAPACITY_EMPTY_ELEMENTDATA) {
        minCapacity = Math.max(DEFAULT_CAPACITY, minCapacity);
    }

    ensureExplicitCapacity(minCapacity);
}

where

/**
 * Default initial capacity.
 */
private static final int DEFAULT_CAPACITY = 10;

What you're referring to is just the zero-sized initial array object that is shared among all initially empty ArrayList objects. I.e. the capacity of 10 is guaranteed lazily, an optimisation that is present also in Java 7.

Admittedly, the constructor contract is not entirely accurate. Perhaps this is the source of confusion here.

Background

Here's an E-Mail by Mike Duigou

I have posted an updated version of the empty ArrayList and HashMap patch.

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mduigou/JDK-7143928/1/webrev/

This revised implementation introduces no new fields to either class. For ArrayList the lazy allocation of the backing array occurs only if the list is created at default size. According to our performance analysis team, approximately 85% of ArrayList instances are created at default size so this optimization will be valid for an overwhelming majority of cases.

For HashMap, creative use is made of the threshold field to track the requested initial size until the bucket array is needed. On the read side the empty map case is tested with isEmpty(). On the write size a comparison of (table == EMPTY_TABLE) is used to detect the need to inflate the bucket array. In readObject there's a little more work to try to choose an efficient initial capacity.

From: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2013-April/015585.html

In java 8 default capacity of ArrayList is 0 until we add at least one object into the ArrayList object (You can call it lazy initialization).

Now question is why this change has been done in JAVA 8?

Answer is to save memory consumption. Millions of array list objects are created in real time java applications. Default size of 10 objects means that we allocate 10 pointers (40 or 80 bytes) for underlying array at creation and fill them in with nulls. An empty array (filled with nulls) occupy lot of memory .

Lazy initialization postpones this memory consumption till moment you will actually use the array list.

Please see below code for help.

ArrayList al = new ArrayList();          //Size:  0, Capacity:  0
ArrayList al = new ArrayList(5);         //Size:  0, Capacity:  5
ArrayList al = new ArrayList(new ArrayList(5)); //Size:  0, Capacity:  0
al.add( "shailesh" );                    //Size:  1, Capacity: 10

public static void main( String[] args )
        throws Exception
    {
        ArrayList al = new ArrayList();
        getCapacity( al );
        al.add( "shailesh" );
        getCapacity( al );
    }

    static void getCapacity( ArrayList<?> l )
        throws Exception
    {
        Field dataField = ArrayList.class.getDeclaredField( "elementData" );
        dataField.setAccessible( true );
        System.out.format( "Size: %2d, Capacity: %2d%n", l.size(), ( (Object[]) dataField.get( l ) ).length );
}

Response: - 
Size:  0, Capacity:  0
Size:  1, Capacity: 10

Article Default capacity of ArrayList in Java 8 explains it in details.

If the very first operation that is done with an ArrayList is to pass addAll a collection which has more than ten elements, then any effort put into creating an initial ten-element array to hold the ArrayList's contents would be thrown out the window. Whenever something is added to an ArrayList it's necessary to test whether the size of the resulting list will exceed the size of the backing store; allowing the initial backing store to have size zero rather than ten will cause this test to fail one extra time in the lifetime of a list whose first operation is an "add" which would require creating the initial ten-item array, but that cost is less than the cost of creating a ten-item array that never ends up getting used.

That having been said, it might have been possible to improve performance further in some contexts if there were a overload of "addAll" which specified how many items (if any) would likely be added to the list after the present one, and which could use that to influence its allocation behavior. In some cases code which adds the last few items to a list will have a pretty good idea that the list is never going to need any space beyond that. There are many situations where a list will get populated once and never modified after that. If at the point code knows that the ultimate size of a list will be 170 elements, it has 150 elements and a backing store of size 160, growing the backing store to size 320 will be unhelpful and leaving it at size 320 or trimming it to 170 will be less efficient than simply having the next allocation grow it to 170.