The documentation for ListBuffers offer two methods that convert the ListBuffer into a List: result and toList.
result says it produces a collection from the added elements and that the contents are undefined afterward.
toList seems to instead make a constant-time lazy copy of the contents of the buffer (and presumably leaves the buffer intact).
If toList is constant time, when would we ever prefer result? And also am I understanding this correctly that toList will preserve the buffer's contents?
If we look at the source we see
def result: List[A] = toList
So (at least in the current version of Scala), there's no need to prefer one to the other.