Will things run quicker if I make my variables final?

Question

I'm writing for Android (Java).

I'm declaring int's and float's as part of an ongoing loop.

Some of them don't need to be changed after declaration.

If I set them all to final when declaring, will things run quicker?

[Edit]

Thanks everyone. I didn't actually expect it to make any improvements, I just noticed, after browsing the source of various large projects, it was fairly common. Cheers

Answer 1

Things will not run quicker. The final keyword is just compile time syntactic sugar.

---

If it were actually static final, then you could take benefit of compiletime calculation and inlining of the value in any refernce. So, with for example:

private static final long ONE_WEEK_IN_MILLIS = 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000L;

public void foo(Date date) {
    if (date.getTiem() > System.currentTimeMillis() + ONE_WEEK_IN_MILLIS) {
        // No idea what to do here?
    }
}

the compiler will optimize one and other so that it ends up like:

private static final long ONE_WEEK_IN_MILLIS = 604800000L;

public void foo(Date date) {
    if (date.getTiem() > System.currentTimeMillis() + 604800000L) {
        // No idea what to do here?
    }
}

If you run a decompiler, you'll see it yourself.