Does declaring things as final speed up Eclipse code analysis and compilation?

Question

I was wondering if making code more explicit helps Eclipse to analyse it faster. For example, if I declare a class as final, the code analyser theoretically can skip searching for its descendants when computing type hierarchy.

So, does it really speed things up?

Answer 1

It is possible that using final keyword could be taken advantage by a smart analysis tool, though I would imagine that analysis is done bottom-up in the class hierarchy because a superclass doesn't need to care about subclasses anyway.

However, using final DOES increase runtime performance somewhat due to certain compiler optimizations that are taken advantage of. This is micro-optimizing though; while it's a good practice to use final when appropriate, the performance increases will not be large compared to optimizing the architecture of the program.