Is "if" optimized?

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#1

I heard that if statements can be really performance-heavy. Since Roblox is a well-designed platform, I suppose ifs are optimized. Right?

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#2

I wouldn’t worry too much. I don’t see what choice you have as there aren’t really many alternatives to an if statement?

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#3

You will need to benchmark it to get a concrete answer, luckily @Eestlane771 has done the heavy lifting here:

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#4

if statements are pretty optimized. Only thing is that if you use them too much with elseif & else, it may make your code look messy. I would refer to that benchmark above.

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#5

Everything can be performence heavy if done the wrong way.
Few If statements is not a big deal but sometimes there are better ways to handle them.

Say you wanna run a certain function if a variable is equal to something.
With If statements it’d look something like this.

local var = "a"

function a(arg) return arg end
function b(arg) return arg end

--//Using if statements
if var == "a" then
	a(nil)
elseif var == "b" then
	b(nil)
end

But you can handle it with tables.

local var = "b"

--//Using tables
local functions = {
	a = function(arg) return arg end;
	b = function(arg) return arg end;
}

functions[var](nil)

In the end it really depends on what you’re doing.

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#6

the issue is not the amount of elseifs, but the amount at which they’re polled;
if you have 30 if’s that constantly run every frame, yeah that’ll be performance heavy

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#7

That won’t happen any time soon.

#8

Just a reminder, you only need to use tables when you need to check various case (because them have jump table), conditional statements are fast, you don’t need to worry