Is it better to create a new object and return it or create the new object in the return statement?

Question

For example:

public Person newPerson() {
  Person p = new Person("Bob", "Smith", 1112223333);
  return p;
}

as opposed to:

public Person newPerson() {
  return new Person("Bob", "Smith", 1112223333);
}

Is one more efficient than the other?

Answer 1

There isn't any difference that would make you chose one over the other in terms of performance.

• For the sake of debugging, the former is better - i.e. when you want to trace the execution, or log some info between creation and returning.
• For the sake of readability (but this is subjective) - the latter is better.

In general, I'd advice for the latter, and whenever you need to debug this, make a temporary switch to the first (two-line) variant.