Why is listFindNoCase() and listFind() "much faster" than a simple OR / IS in CF?

Question

I fail to understand, why is using listFindNoCase() and ListFind() the preferred way of doing a series of OR and IS/EQ comparison? Wouldn't the JVM be able to optimize it and produce efficient code, rather then making a function call that has to deal with tokenizing a string? Or is CF doing something much more inefficient??

Use listFindNoCase() or listFind() instead of the is and or operators to compare one item to multiple items. They are much faster.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/coldfusion_performance.html

Answer 1

The answer is simple: Type conversion. You can can compare a 2 EQ "2" or now() EQ "2011-01-01", or true EQ "YES". The cost of converting (to multiple types ) and comparing is quite high.

ListFind() does not need to try multiple conversions, so it is much faster.

This is the price of dynamic typing.

Answer 2

I find this odd too. The only thing I can think of is that the list elements are added to a fast collection that check if an element exists based on some awesome hash of the elements it contains. This would in fact be faster for large or very large lists. The smaller lists should show little or no speed boost.