Is it better to create a new object and return it or create the new object in the return statement?

Question

For example:

public Person newPerson() {
  Person p = new Person(\"Bob\", \"Smith\", 1112223333);
  return p;
}

as opposed to:

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Answer 1

There isn't any difference that would make you chose one over the other in terms of performance.

• For the sake of debugging, the former is better - i.e. when you want to trace the execution, or log some info between creation and returning.
• For the sake of readability (but this is subjective) - the latter is better.

In general, I'd advice for the latter, and whenever you need to debug this, make a temporary switch to the first (two-line) variant.