Removing the “first” object from a Set

Question

Under certain situations, I need to evict the oldest element in a Java Set. The set is implemented using a LinkedHashSet, which makes this simple: just get rid of t

Answer 1

If you really need to do this at several places in your code, just write a static method.

The other solutions proposed are often slower since they imply calling the Set.remove(Object) method instead of the Iterator.remove() method.

@Nullable
public static  T removeFirst(Collection c) {
  Iterator it = c.iterator();
  if (!it.hasNext()) { return null; }
  T removed = it.next();
  it.remove();
  return removed;
}