This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Weiqi Gao. Original Post: Brian Coyner: Throwing Null Feed Title: Weiqi Gao's Weblog Feed URL: http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/rss.xml Feed Description: Sharing My Experience... Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Weiqi Gao Latest Posts From Weiqi Gao's Weblog

Brian Coyner: Did you know that you can throw null?

Go read Brian's post now.

Done? Good.

When I ran Brian's example on a three-year-old WinXP Pro SP2 Pentium 4 3.2GHz, 2.5 GB RAM, Java 6, I get the following results:

[weiqi@gao]$ java NullExceptionTest # throwNull 
Average Time (nano): 18022
Average Time (nano): 17965
Average Time (nano): 19184
Average Time (nano): 17377
Average Time (nano): 16760
Average Time (nano): 16423
[weiqi@gao]$ java NullExceptionTest # throwNullPointerException
Average Time (nano): 3884
Average Time (nano): 3327
Average Time (nano): 2980
Average Time (nano): 2669
Average Time (nano): 3024
Average Time (nano): 2724

Throwing null is still more expensive than throwing a new NullPointerException, however the ratio is 5.68 rather than the 45 on Brian's machine.

Now I'm curious how the numbers will respond to arch/os/runtime variations.