Dear Fop-Devs,
as far as I can tell, there where two issues with my cleanups
yesterday: Readablility and Performance.
I've just submitted a patch which adds a "ListUtil" class, to make the
code more readable again. I've replaced (hopefully) all occurrences of
size() - 1 with the call to these utils. Since they are static the
hotspot engine will pick them up and inline them very nicely, so there
should be no performance overhead.
I hope this addresses the readability issue.
Performance of list.get(list.size()-1). In the default implementation
of LinkedList ( sun jdk), there is no performance penalty for this
call. The list is linked from both ends, and all calls to an element >
size()/2 are searched from the back. There is a small overhead, since
we now have two virtual method calls instead of one, again something
that hotspot can iron out very nicely.
Also: Calls to interface methods are not slower than calls to the
class directly: In both cases the virtual method table is consulted,
as class methods are overridable. The only exception is if the class
method or the class is declared final: Then the compiler may optimize
the calls.
I've also noted:
There are a lot of list.size() > 0 calls. I've replaced the ones in
the touched files with .isEmpty(), which is more performant.
Max
