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Date: Tue, 17 May 2016 10:02:07 +0100
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Subject: Re: [ALL] Performance of foreach loop with arrays.
From: sebb <sebbaz@gmail.com>
To: Commons Developers List <dev@commons.apache.org>
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archived-at: Tue, 17 May 2016 09:02:12 -0000

On 17 May 2016 at 06:04, Eric Barnhill <ericbarnhill@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a related story. There is a class in commons-math 4.0 called
> IntegerRange. Stylistically I much prefer Iterating over such a range than
> C style loops and was ready to convert. However I found it many times
> slower, at least in not terribly rigorous home micro-benchmarking.
>
> Any good reason why this should be so?

This is off-topic for the thread, which is about *arrays*.

Please start a new thread.

> On 16 May 2016 15:14, "sebb" <sebbaz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Looking for feedback on C-style and foreach() loops when using arrays.
>> [This email does not consider collections; please start another thread
>> if you want to discuss that.]
>>
>> TLDR; Always use foreach() with arrays unless you need access to the index.
>>
>> ==
>>
>> There are two main ways to iterate over an array:
>>
>> for(int i=0; i < array.length; i++ ) { // C-style
>>    doSomething(array[i]);
>> }
>>
>> for(Object item : array) { // generic foreach
>>   doSomething(item);
>> }
>>
>> The JVM has special instructions to load/store items from arrays;
>> different instructions are used for Objects and each primitive type;
>> these instructions only require the array start address and the index.
>>
>> There have been suggestions that the for loop is less efficient
>> because it creates an iterator which needs to be garbage collected.
>>
>> AFAICT in the case of *arrays* there is absolutely no need for the
>> compiler to create an iterator (or indeed any other temporary object)
>> in order to support the foreach() loop.
>>
>> Experiments with javap confirm this.
>>
>> IMO the only reason to prefer the C-style loop is where the index is
>> needed for something else in the loop.
>>
>> Otherwise the foreach() loop seems much better to me:
>> - simpler to code and read
>> - cannot accidentally use the wrong index or wrong index comparison
>>
>> Also the C-style loop evaluates the index each time through the loop;
>> one needs to code it as below to avoid this (the optimiser may do this
>> anyway):
>>
>> int len = array.length; // take array length out of loop
>> for(int =0i; i < len; i++ ) { // C-style
>>    doSomething(array[i]);
>> }
>>
>> This is even messier and more prone to error.
>>
>> Note: javap does show an extra astore/aload instruction pair in the
>> test loop prior to calling doSomething() in the foreach() case. Those
>> appear to be superfluous and will presumably be optimised away at
>> runtime. A later compiler will likely fix this. In any case the
>> overhead of two local memory accesses is miniscule.
>>
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