why is the enhanced for loop more efficient than the normal for loop

Question

I read that the enhanced for loop is more efficient than the normal for loop here:

http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/performance.html#fo

Answer 1

It's a bit of an oversimplification to say that the enhanced for loop is more efficient. It can be, but in many cases it's almost exactly the same as an old-school loop.

The first thing to note is that for collections the enhanced for loop uses an Iterator, so if you manually iterate over a collection using an Iterator then you should have pretty much the same performance than the enhanced for loop.

One place where the enhanced for loop is faster than a naively implemented traditional loop is something like this:

LinkedList<Object> list = ...;

// Loop 1:
int size = list.size();
for (int i = 0; i<size; i++) {
   Object o = list.get(i);
   /// do stuff
}

// Loop 2:
for (Object o : list) {
  // do stuff
}

// Loop 3:
Iterator<Object> it = list.iterator();
while (it.hasNext()) {
  Object o = it.next();
  // do stuff
}

In this case Loop 1 will be slower than both Loop 2 and Loop 3, because it will have to (partially) traverse the list in each iteration to find the element at position i. Loop 2 and 3, however will only ever step one element further in the list, due to the use of an Iterator. Loop 2 and 3 will also have pretty much the same performance since Loop 3 is pretty much exactly what the compiler will produce when you write the code in Loop 2.