Think Twice Before Using Varargs

Varargs, which is short for variadic arguments, are a pretty cool thing. They allow your functions to take from 0 to n arguments, the amount of possible function arguments might differ from language to language though. Most of you have probably already used a function which makes use of varargs. Throughout this blog post, I am gonna use Java for examples.

As an example, let's look at String.format(String, Object...):

String name = "Marcel"
String.format("Hello %s.%nThe weather is quite good today.", name);

The resulting String would look like this:

Hello Marcel.
The weather is quite good today.

We could also use the function to just add a line break, but pass no additional variables:

String name = "Marcel"
String.format("Hello.%nThe weather is quite good today.");

This would still compile, since varargs allow from 0 to n arguments, which is totally fine for our use case though.

But let's look at a more dangerous example:

class Screamer {
    /**
     * Screams each passed word onto a new line.
     *
     * @params words are the things to be screamed
     */
    void screamWords(String... words) {
        for( String word: words ) {
            System.out.println("Scream: " + words.toUpperCase());
        }
    }
}

class IntenseScreamer extends Screamer{
    @Override
    void screamWords(String... words) {
        //Intensify the words by adding exclamation marks!
        for( int index = 0; index < words.length; index++ ) {
            words[index] = words[index] + "!!!";
        }

        super.screamWords();
    }
}

In case you haven't noticed the error, I forgot passing the words to the supercall. That happens quite easy, since it allows 0 arguments as well. In such case, an empty array will be passed, since varargs are nothing but arrays under the hood.

I am not telling you to avoid varargs completely, but sometimes you might just want to use an array, as it will give you some compile-time safety, since you have to at least pass an empty array.

In my opinion, you should avoid using varargs if you could potentially pass an incorrect amount of values, since there can not be any compile-time checking without using third party tools.

This actually happened to me at work, which is why I bring it up. I wasted a while before I found the problem, since I didn't check every place where the parameters were passed on. I just knew that nobody mutates them and I knew that they were passed correctly in the beginning, so why the hell was I getting an empty array.

A colleague pointed out that it might annoy some people to always create arrays, which is kind of the reason why varargs are so nice to use. A possible solution to that problem would be a mandatory parameter followed by a vararg parameter of the same type.

Here is an example:

//Defining your method
void hello(String nameOne, String... restOfNames) {
    String names[] = new String[restOfNames.length + 1];
    names[0] = nameOne;
    System.arraycopy(restOfNames, 0, names, 1, restOfNames.length);

    //Implementation...
}

//Calling it
hello("Marcel", "Jeff", "John");