It really depends on the use. But perhaps this is due to the fact that the complexity of the space when growing linked lists is cheap, and if you just iterate through the collection, you do not perform any search operations, this is a good choice. Recall that the ArrayList implementation has a geometric growth model and is a poor choice if you don't know how big the list will be. Increasing the list for the current capacity will cause the current array to be copied to the new array twice as much as the current capacity.