What is faster: ? or If (C)

[Ricardo_V]

hello,

Is it faster to use the ? operator or an IF sentence?
Is there any good website where I can find information related to that kind of topics?

thanks in advance

[Bludd]

Can't you do some performance testing yourself? Many IDEs have this feature.

[rg3]

There would be something very wrong with the compiler if one of them was significantly faster than the other. I suppose it's only syntactic sugar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar), and it doesn't affect performance. By the way, the ? operator is very useful in C++ class constructor initializer expresions, but that's a different matter, as in that case it really increase language expressiveness.

[Destroyer]

I think rg3 said it right. shouldnt make a huge difference, and even if 1 is slightly faster then the other I think it might depend on the compiler.
I say use whatever you whish. make the optimizations when it comes to algorithms, thats where choosing a faster option can make a huge difference.

[Jiminator]

remember that ? is a type specific expression, if is not. a secondary issue is with code maintainibility, if you nest multiple ? expressions then it can become hard to figure out what is what. anyway cpus are so fast today that either one will not make much of a difference, it is the library/os calls that do the performance hit. (unless you are doing serious math).