Disadvantages of Immutable objects

Question

I know that Immutable objects offer several advantages over mutable objects like they are easier to reason about than mutable ones, they do not have complex state spaces that change over time, we can pass them around freely, they make safe hash table keys etc etc.So my question is what are the disadvantages of immutable objects??

Answer 1

Quoting from Effective Java:

The only real disadvantage of immutable classes is that they require a separate object for each distinct value. Creating these objects can be costly, especially if they are large. For example, suppose that you have a million-bit BigInteger and you want to change its low-order bit:

BigInteger moby = ...; 
moby = moby.flipBit(0);

The flipBit method creates a new BigInteger instance, also a million bits long, that differs from the original in only one bit. The operation requires time and space proportional to the size of the BigInteger. Contrast this to java.util.BitSet. Like BigInteger, BitSet represents an arbitrarily long sequence of bits, but unlike BigInteger, BitSet is mutable. The BitSet class provides a method that allows you to change the state of a single bit of a millionbit instance in constant time.

Read the full item on Item 15: Minimize mutability

Answer 2

Apart from possible performance drawbacks (possible! because with the complexity of GC and HotSpot optimisations, immutable structures are not necessarily slower) - one drawback can be that state must now be threaded through your whole application. For simple applications or tiny scripts the effort to maintain state this way might be too high to buy you concurrency safety.

For example think of a GUI framework like Swing. It would be definitely possible to write a GUI framework entirely using immutable structures and one main "unsafe" outer loop, and I guess this has been done in Haskell. Some of the problems of maintaining nested immutable state can be addressed for example with lenses. But managing all the interactions (registering listeners etc.) may get quite involved, so you might instead want to introduce new abstractions such as functional-reactive or hybrid-reactive GUIs.

Basically you lose some of OO's encapsulation by going all immutable, and when this becomes a problem there are alternative approaches such as actors or STM.

Answer 3

I work with Scala on a daily basis. Immutability has certain key advantages as we all know. However sometimes it's just plain easier to allow mutable content in some situations. Here's a contrived example:

var counter = 0
something.map {e =>
  ...
  counter += 1
}

Of course I could just have the map return a tuple with the payload and count, or use a collection.size if available. But in this case the mutable counter is arguably more clear. In general I prefer immutability but also allow myself to make exceptions.

Answer 4

To answer this question I would quote Programming in Scala, second Edition, chapter "Next Steps in Scala", item 11, by Lex Spoon, Bill Venners and Martin Odersky :

The Scala perspective, however, is that val and var are just two different tools in your toolbox, both useful, neither inherently evil. Scala encourages you to lean towards vals, but ultimately reach for the best tool given the job at hand.

So I would say that just as for programming languages, val and var solves different problems : there is no "disavantage / avantage" without context, there is just a problem to solve, and both of val / var address differently the problem.

Hope it helps, even if it does not provide a concrete list of pros / cons !