A lot of answers have been given, based on technical considerations, especially around performance. According to me, choice between TreeSet and HashSet matters. But I would rather say the choice should be driven by conceptual considerations first. If, for the objects your need to manipulate, a natural ordering does not make sense, then do not use TreeSet. It is a sorted set, since it implements SortedSet. So it means you need to override function compareTo, which should be consistent with what returns function equals. For example if you have a set of objects of a class called Student, then I do not think a TreeSet would make sense, since there is no natural ordering between students. You can order them by their average grade, okay, but this is not a "natural ordering". Function compareTo would return 0 not only when two objects represent the same student, but also when two different students have the same grade. For the second case, equals would return false (unless you decide to make the latter return true when two different students have the same grade, which would make equals function have a misleading meaning, not to say a wrong meaning.) Please note this consistency between equals and compareTo is optional, but strongly recommended. Otherwise the contract of interface Set is broken, making your code misleading to other people, thus also possibly leading to unexpected behavior.

这个链接可能是关于这个问题的一个很好的信息来源。

如果您没有插入足够多的元素导致频繁重散列(或冲突，如果您的HashSet不能调整大小)，那么HashSet当然可以为您提供常量时间访问的好处。但是对于有大量增长或收缩的集合，使用Treesets实际上可能会获得更好的性能，这取决于实现。

如果我没记错的话，平摊时间可以接近于一个功能性红黑树的O(1)。冈崎的书会有比我更好的解释。(或参阅他的出版物列表)

1.HashSet允许空对象。

2.树集不允许空对象。如果你试图添加空值，它将抛出一个NullPointerException。

3.HashSet比TreeSet快得多。

e.g.

 TreeSet<String> ts = new TreeSet<String>();
 ts.add(null); // throws NullPointerException

 HashSet<String> hs = new HashSet<String>();
 hs.add(null); // runs fine

明明可以吃橘子，为什么要吃苹果?

Seriously guys and gals - if your collection is large, read and written to gazillions of times, and you're paying for CPU cycles, then the choice of the collection is relevant ONLY if you NEED it to perform better. However, in most cases, this doesn't really matter - a few milliseconds here and there go unnoticed in human terms. If it really mattered that much, why aren't you writing code in assembler or C? [cue another discussion]. So the point is if you're happy using whatever collection you chose, and it solves your problem [even if it's not specifically the best type of collection for the task] knock yourself out. The software is malleable. Optimise your code where necessary. Uncle Bob says Premature Optimisation is the root of all evil. Uncle Bob says so

当然，HashSet实现要快得多——开销更少，因为没有排序。http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/collections/implementations/set.html提供了Java中各种Set实现的很好的分析。

这里的讨论还指出了一种有趣的“中间地带”方法来解决树与哈希的问题。Java提供了一个LinkedHashSet，它是一个HashSet，其中运行着一个“面向插入”的链表，也就是说，链表中的最后一个元素也是最近插入到哈希中的元素。这允许您避免无序散列的无序性，而不会增加TreeSet的成本。

import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Set;
import java.util.TreeSet;

public class HashTreeSetCompare {

    //It is generally faster to add elements to the HashSet and then
    //convert the collection to a TreeSet for a duplicate-free sorted
    //Traversal.

    //really? 
    O(Hash + tree set) > O(tree set) ??
    Really???? Why?



    public static void main(String args[]) {

        int size = 80000;
        useHashThenTreeSet(size);
        useTreeSetOnly(size);

    }

    private static void useTreeSetOnly(int size) {

        System.out.println("useTreeSetOnly: ");
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        Set<String> sortedSet = new TreeSet<String>();

        for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) {
            sortedSet.add(i + "");
        }

        //System.out.println(sortedSet);
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

        System.out.println("useTreeSetOnly: " + (end - start));
    }

    private static void useHashThenTreeSet(int size) {

        System.out.println("useHashThenTreeSet: ");
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        Set<String> set = new HashSet<String>();

        for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) {
            set.add(i + "");
        }

        Set<String> sortedSet = new TreeSet<String>(set);
        //System.out.println(sortedSet);
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

        System.out.println("useHashThenTreeSet: " + (end - start));
    }
}