How efficient is a switch statement?

How efficient is a switch statement?

A switch statement is usually more efficient than a set of nested ifs. Deciding whether to use if-then-else statements or a switch statement is based on readability and the expression that the statement is testing. Speed: A switch statement might prove to be faster than ifs provided number of cases are good.

Are switch statements fast?

As it turns out, the switch statement is faster in most cases when compared to if-else , but significantly faster only when the number of conditions is large. The primary difference in performance between the two is that the incremental cost of an additional condition is larger for if-else than it is for switch .

Are switch statements faster than if-else C#?

The results show that the switch statement is faster to execute than the if-else-if ladder. However, because each case within a switch statement does not rely on earlier cases, the compiler is able to re-order the testing in such a way as to provide the fastest execution.

Why are switch statements evaluated from top to bottom?

For many years I wrote switch statements under the assumption that the case values would be evaluated from top to bottom. That is, if the compiler chose to implement the switch statement as an if-else-if chain, then it would first test the first case, then the second case and so on down to the default case at the bottom of my source code.

How is the switch statement treated in Stack Overflow?

They seem to be loosely divided into the following trichotomy: An if-else-if-else-if chain. In this implementation, the switch statement is treated as syntactic sugar for an if-else-if chain. Some form of jump or control tables, or as they are sometimes called a computed goto.

When to put a switch in a return statement?

Placing the switch in a separate method allows you to place return statements directly inside the switch statement (at least in c#), eliminating the need for break statements either, making the code much easier to read. And this is imho much nicer than the if/else if/else if approach.

Which is an example of a defaulted switch statement?

For example consider a defaulted switch statement with contiguous case values in the range zero to ten. If the index variable is an unsigned int, then there are at least 65525 possible values handled by the default case, and so it makes sense to eliminate them first.