In java is boolean or integer arithmetic faster?

Question

in Java is it faster to do an operation on two Booleans or two two integers? For example, is 1*1 or true&&false faster? What about doubles? In general what is the fastest primitive data type to work with? how does one find out how to measure the speed of these things?

Answer 1

If interesting I did such tests some time ago: The tests were like (with big amount of iterations):

final int[] int_array=...;
final boolean[] bool_array=...;
etc.
if (int_array[i]==67) ...
if (bool_array[i]) ...
if (float_array[i]==67.0F) ...
etc.
Time in seconds:
    Desktop(64bit Windows)  Device (Android)           

    bitmask 4.050           0.350
    boolean 4.554-5.169     0.306-0.359
    byte    0.583-0.915     0.263-0.293
    char    0.587-0.814     0.280-0.329
    short   0.583-0.914     0.280-0.290
    int     0.548-0.949     0.288-0.338
    float   0.824-1.129     0.965-1.035
    long    0.646-1.054     0.480-0.509
    double  0.828-0.971     1.138-1.214

Answer 2

It will depend on the underlying architecture. In general, the fastest types will be the ones that correspond to your native word size: 32-bit on a 32-bit machine, or 64-bit on a 64-bit machine.

So int is faster than long on a 32-bit machine; long might be faster than int on a 64-bit machine, or the might be the same. As for boolean, I would imagine it's using the native word size anyway, so it will be pretty much exactly as fast as int or long.

Doubles (using floating point arithmetic) tend to be slower.

As long as you are dealing with primitive types, the difference will be negligible. The really slow types are the class types (like Integer or Boolean) -- avoid those if you want performance.