Question

When you have to deal with numbers for anything else than short computation, is it a loss of time and energy using always NSNumber ?

What’s the best approach ?

Answer 1

When you have to deal with numbers for anything else than short computation, is it a loss of time and energy using always NSNumber?

Well, NSNumber generally has to go through the allocation and reference counting hoops to create, so that takes a lot longer than creating a float on the stack.

As well, NSNumber is an immutable type, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to set it often because every time it changes, you have to allocate a new instance. There are a few optimizations they make, but it’s still huge overhead relative to creating a float on the stack. Using builtins will also require less memory than NSNumber more often than the other way around.

What’s the best approach?

I just use builtins (e.g. float, int) unless I need an NSNumber. Details and rationale here.