Question

Assuming

boolean a = false;

I was wondering if doing:

a &= b; 

is equivalent to

a = a && b; //logical AND, a is false hence b is not evaluated.

or on the other hand it means

a = a & b; //Bitwise AND. Both a and b are evaluated.

Answer 1

From the Java Language Specification – 15.26.2 Compound Assignment Operators.

A compound assignment expression of the form E1 op= E2 is equivalent to E1 = (T)((E1) op (E2)), where T is the type of E1, except that E1 is evaluated only once.

So a &= b; is equivalent to a = a & b;.

(In some usages, the type-casting makes a difference to the result, but in this one b has to be boolean and the type-cast does nothing.)

And, for the record, a &&= b; is not valid Java. There is no &&= operator.

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In practice, there is little semantic difference between a = a & b; and a = a && b;. (If b is a variable or a constant, the result is going to be the same for both versions. There is only a semantic difference when b is a subexpression that has side-effects. In the & case, the side-effect always occurs. In the && case it occurs depending on the value of a.)

On the performance side, the trade-off is between the cost of evaluating b, and the cost of a test and branch of the value of a, and the potential saving of avoiding an unnecessary assignment to a. The analysis is not straight-forward, but unless the cost of calculating b is non-trivial, the performance difference between the two versions is too small to be worth considering.