Replace with .lengthCompare warning

Question

IntelliJ keep suggesting to replace .length == X with .lengthCompare(X) == 0. Why is that better? Don't quite get it, since the suggested changes are more verbose.

Answer 1

It is more efficient.

Since length is a linear operation on some collections like List, doing x.length == 3 would need to compute the length first and then compare it with the value. On the other hand .lengthCompare would terminate computing the length once it finds that the comparison is wrong already.