Empty ILookup<K, T>

Question

I have a method that returns an ILookup. In some cases I want to return an empty ILookup as an early exit. What is the best way of constructing an empty ILookup?

Answer 1

Further to the answers from mquander and Vasile Bujac, you could create a nice, straightforward singleton-esque EmptyLookup<K,E> class as follows. (In my opinion, there doesn't seem much benefit to creating a full ILookup<K,E> implementation as per Vasile's answer.)

var empty = EmptyLookup<int, string>.Instance;

// ...

public static class EmptyLookup<TKey, TElement>
{
    private static readonly ILookup<TKey, TElement> _instance
        = Enumerable.Empty<TElement>().ToLookup(x => default(TKey));

    public static ILookup<TKey, TElement> Instance
    {
        get { return _instance; }
    }
}