Which is faster, try catch or if-else in java (WRT performance)

Question

Which one is faster:

Either this

try {
  n.foo();
} 
catch(NullPointerException ex) {
}

or

if (n != null) n.foo();         


        

Answer 1

Beside the good answers (use exceptions for exceptional cases) I see that you're basically trying to avoid the null checks everywhere. Java 7 will have a "null safe" operator that will return null when n?.foo() is called instead of throwing a NPE. That's borrowed from the Groovy language. There's also a trend to avoid using null altogether in one's code except when really needed (ie: dealing with libraries). See this other answer for more discussion on this. Avoiding != null statements