java - x > -1 vs x >= 0, is there a performance difference

Question

I have heard a teacher drop this once, and it has been bugging me ever since. Let's say we want to check if the integer x is bigger than or equal to 0. There are two ways to check this:

if (x > -1){
    //do stuff
}

and

if (x >= 0){
    //do stuff
} 

According to this teacher > would be slightly faster then >=. In this case it was Java, but according to him this also applied for C, c++ and other languages. Is there any truth to this statement?

Answer 1

It is very much dependent on the underlying architecture, but any difference will be minuscule.

If anything, I'd expect (x >= 0) to be slightly faster, as comparison with 0 comes for free on some instruction sets (such as ARM).

Of course, any sensible compiler will choose the best implementation regardless of which variant is in your source.