Best Practices Java - StringBuffer

It's been 3 years when I have not done any blogging here. Some day before, one of my friends was asking me about StringBuffer and he has the point that I don't have any justification that why Sun has created StringBuffer.

I am writing this blog from a very rural village of Bihar, India. The common problem I found was people are not utilizing the time in best of work. Many of the kids go to the market to bring one-one item at a time. Alright, are we engineers also follow the same trend.

We use String as default and then we keep adding things in it. Something like:

String dontUse = "This";
dontUse +="is not right";

Alright, here is a small code I have written to understand the estimated time.

public class StringBufferExample {

public static void main(String[] args) {

String[] dontUse = new String[10000];
                //StringBuffer[] dontUse = new StringBuffer[10000];
for(int i=0;i<10000;i++) { }
long startTime = System.nanoTime();
for(int i=0;i<10000;i++) {
                        dontUse[i]= new String("this");
// dontUse[i]= new StringBuffer("this");
}
for(int i=0;i<10000;i++) {
                        dontUse[i]+="is wrong";
// dontUse[i].append("is wrong");
}
long endTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println(endTime - startTime);

}
}

Approx Time taken from this code: 5501435(ns) whereas if you run the commented code, it will take: 2258812(ns)
So, not visible but normal String operation for "simply" addition of two string is "twice" costlier than StringBuffer.

Running: javap -c -classpath . StringBufferExample (copying those lines which are costly), will clearly tell you why String operation is a costly affair(actually it was never a String operation, it changes things to StringBuffer and then again convert it by toString to String).


   64:  if_icmpge       97
   67:  new     #6; //class java/lang/StringBuilder
   70:  dup
   71:  invokespecial   #7; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder."<init>":()V
   74:  aload_1
   75:  iload   4
   77:  dup2_x1
   78:  aaload
   79:  invokevirtual   #8; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/
String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
   82:  ldc     #9; //String is wrong
   84:  invokevirtual   #8; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/
String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
   87:  invokevirtual   #10; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder.toString:()Ljava/l
ang/String;
   90:  aastore


Now in the next blog, I will cover how StringBuffer handles the capacity, how it enlarge its capacity and when. It's a pretty simple code written in JDK.