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Why switch is faster than if

Anonymous User 1783 04 Dec 2015
I have found lots of books in java saying switch statement is faster than if else statement. But I didnot find antwhere saying why switch is faster than if.

Example
I have a situation i have to choose any one item out of two i can use either of the following way

switch(item){
case BREAD:
     //eat Bread
break;
default:
    //leave the restaurant
}
or using if statement like the following

if(item== BREAD){
//eat Bread
}else{
//leave the restaurant
}
considering item and BREAD is constant int value

In the above example which is faster in action and why?
java java
Updated 04 Dec 2015
Anonymous User
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1 Answers

Anonymous User
Anonymous User 04 Dec 2015 Accepted Answer
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Because there are special bytecodes that allow efficient switch statement evaluation when there are a lot of cases.

If implemented with IF-statements you would have a check, a jump to the next clause, a check, a jump to the next clause and so on. With switch the JVM loads the value to compare and iterates through the value table to find a match, which is faster in most cases
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