Optimization is premature if: Your application isn’t doing anything time-critical. (Which means, if you’re writing a program that adds up 500 numbers in a file, the word “optimization” shouldn’t even pop into your brain, since all it’ll do is waste your time.) You’re doing something time-critical in something other than assembly, and still worrying whether … Read more
First: you shouldn’t be making the choice of static vs non-static on the basis of performance. Second: in practice, it won’t make any difference. Hotspot may choose to optimize in ways that make static calls faster for one method, non-static calls faster for another. Third: much of the mythos surrounding static versus non-static are based … Read more
No, a call to array.length is O(1) or constant time operation. Since the .length is(acts like) a public final member of array, it is no slower to access than a local variable. (It is very different from a call to a method like size()) A modern JIT compiler is likely to optimize the call to … Read more
Don Knuth started the literate programming movement because he believed that the most important function of computer code is to communicate the programmer’s intent to a human reader. Any coding practice that makes your code harder to understand in the name of performance is a premature optimization. Certain idioms that were introduced in the name … Read more