Question

Are there any performance differences between

 float x, y;
 // Set x and y
 if(x > y)
 {
    // do something
 }

and

 float x,y;
 // Set x and y
 if(x.CompareTo(y) > 0)
 {
    // do something
 }

Are they doing the same thing behind the scenes or is there more to it. I have a piece of performance critical code that does this comparison many, many times and I wanted to check that there wasn’t more going on than I thought.

Answer 1

The first one will be a little bit faster and a lot more readable.

x > y compiles to an IL instruction that compares two values on the stack.

x.CompareTo(y) > 0 compiles to a normal method call followed by a comparison, which will be a little bit slower.