"Although no Usenet discussion groups are dedicated purely to Java performance, there are many discussions about performance tuning and optimization. A good portion of these discussions rely on results obtained from micro performance benchmarks, so we're also going to talk about some of the benefits and pitfalls of microbenchmarking in this month's column.
"One particular question caught our eye: which operation is faster, i++ or ++i? We have seen this question asked in various forms in every forum that we cover. As simple as the question it appears, there seems to be no definitive answer.
"First, in case you are unaware of the difference, ++i uses the pre-increment operator, whereas i++ uses the post-increment operator. While both increment the variable i, the pre-increment operator returns the value i had before the increment operation, and the post-increment operator returns the value i has after the increment operation..."
