Comparison method violates its general contract!

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Comparison method violates its general contract!

Well, this is definitely the weirdest Java exception I’ve had so far. I got it on a Comparator I wrote, which returned either -1 or 1 (no == check was performed , and I never returned 0) .

This will happen to you usually when switching to Java 7 from older versions of Java. (Happened  to me when I switched from 6 to 7)

Long story short , the solution was to add the following line (Which is generally a good idea) to your Comparator :

if (o1 == o2) return 0;

Why does it happens ? Well, according to Java 7 change set, they replaced the merge sort implementation , and from now on

The new sort implementation may throw an IllegalArgumentException if it detects a Comparable that violates the Comparable contract.

Why is that important to them? I have no idea, but I’m guessing maybe the new merge sort works better when some elements are equal (i.e , the compartor returns 0), and having a”bad” comprator hinders performances. .

What I do fail to understand is why this contract validity test done on runtime and not on compilation time!