Why are static variables considered evil?

Question

I am a Java programmer who is new to the corporate world. Recently I\'ve developed an application using Groovy and Java. All through the code I wrote used quite a good numbe

Answer 1

There are two main questions in your post.

First, about static variables. Static variables are completelly unnecesary and it's use can be avoided easily. In OOP languajes in general, and in Java particularlly, function parameters are pased by reference, this is to say, if you pass an object to a funciont, you are passing a pointer to the object, so you dont need to define static variables since you can pass a pointer to the object to any scope that needs this information. Even if this implies that yo will fill your memory with pointers, this will not necesary represent a poor performance because actual memory pagging systems are optimized to handle with this, and they will maintain in memory the pages referenced by the pointers you passed to the new scope; usage of static variables may cause the system to load the memory page where they are stored when they need to be accessed (this will happen if the page has not been accesed in a long time). A good practice is to put all that static stuf together in some little "configuration clases", this will ensure the system puts it all in the same memory page.

Second, about static methods. Static methods are not so bad, but they can quickly reduce performance. For example, think about a method that compares two objects of a class and returns a value indicating which of the objects is bigger (tipical comparison method) this method can be static or not, but when invoking it the non static form will be more eficient since it will have to solve only two references (one for each object) face to the three references that will have to solve the static version of the same method (one for the class plus two, one for each object). But as I say, this is not so bad, if we take a look at the Math class, we can find a lot of math functions defined as static methods. This is really more eficient than putting all these methods in the class defining the numbers, because most of them are rarelly used and including all of them in the number class will cause the class to be very complex and consume a lot of resources unnecesarilly.

In concluson: Avoid the use of static variables and find the correct performance equilibrium when dealing with static or non static methods.

PS: Sorry for my english.