Is CONSTANT.equals(VARIABLE) faster than VARIABLE.equals(CONSTANT)?

Question

I had an interesting conversation with one of my team mate.

Is CONSTANT.equals(VARIABLE) faster than VARIABLE.equals(CONSTANT)in Java?

Answer 1

Made a simple test with Strings:

final String constHello = "Hello";
final int times = 1000000000;

long constTimeStart = System.nanoTime();

for (int i = 0; i < times; ++i) {
    constHello.equals("Hello");
}

long constTimeStop = System.nanoTime();

System.out.println("constHello.equals(\"Hello\"); " + times + " times: " + (constTimeStop - constTimeStart) + " ns");


constTimeStart = System.nanoTime();

for (int i = 0; i < times; ++i) {
    "Hello".equals(constHello);
}

constTimeStop = System.nanoTime();

System.out.println("\"Hello\".equals(constHello); " + times + " times: " + (constTimeStop - constTimeStart) + " ns");

Edit: As mentioned in the comments below, this wasn't a good way of doing micromeasurements. Switching which part of the code which was going to be executed first proved that warm up time played a significant role here. The first test always runs slower. Repeating the test multiple times in the same code to quickfix this makes the results more or less the same.