Question

for (int i=0; i<arr.length; i++) {
}

This will result in a code:

getstatic   #4;
arraylength

While the following code:

int length = arr.length;
for (int i=0; i<length; i++) {
}

will be compiled as:

iload_3

Is there a difference between the two snippets? Which code runs faster?

As you an see, the array is a static member in my case. Static and final to be exact. Taking JIT optimization into account, a basic optimizer can sense that and hard code the length of the array into the machine code of the method. It is much harder to follow this logic with a local variable (second case), so one would think there is a greater chance that the first one will be optimized than the second.

Answer 1

As it’s static and final, I suspect it could hard-code the length, although I’m not sure it would go that far. But the JIT compiler may well still be able to do better with the first form than the second.

In particular, if it can detect that the array doesn’t change within the loop, it can avoid evaluating the length more than once and remove array bounds checks within the loop – it can validate that you’re never going to access the array outside the range [0, length).

I would hope that by now, decent JITs would notice the second form too – but I’d still prefer the first form for readability, and I’d want evidence of it not performing as well as the second before changing to that one.

As ever, write the most readable code first, but measure it against performance requirements.