DoubleBraceInitialization
Prefer collection factory methods or builders to the double-brace initialization pattern.

The problem

The double-brace initialization pattern should be avoided—especially in non-static contexts.

The double-brace pattern uses an instance-initializer in an anonymous inner class to express the initialization of a class (often a collection) in a single step.

Inner classes in a non-static context are terrific sources of memory leaks! If you pass the collection somewhere that retains it, the entire instance you created it from can no longer be garbage collected. Even if it is completely unreachable. And if someone serializes the map? Yep, the entire creating instance goes along for the ride (or if that fails, serializing the map fails, which is also awfully strange). All this is completely nonobvious.

Luckily, there are more readable and more performant alternatives in the factory methods and builders for ImmutableList, ImmutableSet, and ImmutableMap.

The List.of, Set.of, and Map.of static factories added in Java 9 are also a good choice.

That is, prefer this:

ImmutableList.of("Denmark", "Norway", "Sweden");

Not this:

new ArrayList<>() {
  {
    add("Denmark");
    add("Norway");
    add("Sweden");
  }
};

TIP: Neither the guava immutable collections nor the static factory methods added in a JDK 9 support null elements. The double-brace pattern is still best avoided for collections that contain null. Consider using Arrays.asList to initialize Lists and Sets with null values, and refactoring Map initializers into a helper method.

Suppression

Suppress false positives by adding the suppression annotation @SuppressWarnings("DoubleBraceInitialization") to the enclosing element.