Question

I have a list of Vector2’s Generated I have to check against a dictionary to see if they exist, this function gets executed every tick.

which would run fastest/ be better to do it this way?

    public static bool exists(Vector2 Position, Dictionary<Vector2, object> ToCheck)
    {
        try
        {
            object Test = ToCheck[Position];
            return (true);
        }
        catch 
        {
            return (false);
        }           
    }

Or should I stick with The norm ?

    public static bool exists(Vector2 Position, Dictionary<Vector2, object> ToCheck)
    {
        if (ToCheck.ContainsKey(Position))
        {
            return (true);
        }
        return (false);
    }

Thanks for the input 🙂

Side Note: (The Value for the key doesn’t matter at this point or i would use TryGetValue instead of ContainsKey)

Answer 1

Definitely use the ContainsKey check; exception handling can add a large overhead.

Throwing exceptions can negatively impact performance. For code that routinely fails, you can use design patterns to minimize performance issues.

Exceptions are not meant to be used for conditions you can check for.

I recommend reading the MSDN documentation on exceptions generally, and on exception handling in particular.