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Home Forums Why switch is faster than if – MindStick
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Why switch is faster than if

Anonymous User 1822 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
Anonymous User
Ask by Anonymous User
Updated 04 Dec 2015

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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