Using Java Stream summary statistics

Streams of primitive types (IntStream, etc.) provide a summaryStatistics() method that can be used to get multiple statistical properties of a stream (minimum value, average value, etc.).

Assume we have a list of people. Our goal is to get the minimum and maximum age of the people in the list using streams.

The problem here is that the computation of the minimum and maximum values are terminal stream operations. So we need to come up with our own reduction implementation or create a new stream for every computation. A naive implementation might look like this:

List<Person> list = Arrays.asList(
        new Person("John Blue", 28),
        new Person("Anna Brown", 53),
        new Person("Paul Black", 47)
);

int min = list.stream()
        .mapToInt(Person::getAge)
        .min()
        .orElseThrow(NoSuchElementException::new);

int max = list.stream()
        .mapToInt(Person::getAge)
        .max()
        .orElseThrow(NoSuchElementException::new);

Luckily Java provides a much simpler way to do this using the summaryStatistics() method:

IntSummaryStatistics statistics = list.stream()
        .mapToInt(Person::getAge)
        .summaryStatistics();

int min = statistics.getMin();
int max = statistics.getMax();

IntSummaryStatistics also provides methods to obtain the count and sum of the stream elements.

You can find the full example code on GitHub.