Performance experiment: if / else vs. switch / case

at 2007-04-24 in Experiments by friebe (0 comments)

Starting from the following piece of code which is basically an excerpt from the remote.protocol.Serializer class:

<?php 
  switch (gettype($arg)) {
    case 'integer': $r= 'INTEGER'; break;
    case 'string': $r= 'STRING'; break;
    case 'boolean': $r= 'BOOL'; break;
    case $arg instanceof Object: $r= 'OBJECT'; break;
  }
?>

...I started wondering how fast that was, say, compared to if/else combination.

The alternatives that came to my head:

Use if/else
Use the ternary operator
Use a do/while(0) loop

The complete sourcecode can be seen in my experiments directory.

Comparison between the different methods:
Chart

Conclusion: The if/else combination is the fastest, followed by the ternary version (which is quite unreadable) and the do/while(0) and break combination - also kind of weird. While I personally think the switch statement is most readable, I had to learn it was also the slowest

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Performance experiment: if / else vs. switch / case

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