Is it expensive to create objects?
.net, class-design
Solution
He might be correct if you have millions of these objects in memory simultaneously. But if you don't, then he's bringing up what is almost certainly a moot point. Always choose a better design first, and then modify it only if you're not meeting performance requirements.
Problem
I have just refactored a colleague's code that, roughly, looked like this... ``` public class Utility public void AddHistoryEntry(int userID, HistoryType Historytype, int companyID) { // Do something... } public void AddHistoryEntry(int userID, HistoryType historyType, int companyID, string notes) { // Do something... } } ``` To this... ``` public class HistoryEntry { public long UserID { get; private set; } public HistoryType HistoryType { get; private set; } public long CompanyID { get; set; } public string Notes { get; set; } public HistoryEntry(long userID, HistoryType historyType) { this.UserID = userID; this.HistoryType = historyType; } } public class Utility { public void AddHistoryEntry(HistoryEntry entry) { // Do something... } } ``` Now, this is much better code design and is an Uncle Bob favourite. However, my colleague argues that it is so much more expensive to new-up an object every time we want to call this method. Is he correct? Further Explanation Utility class doesn't exist. I just wanted to put the methods in a class for you all to see. In actuality it's in a sensible class. There were, in fact, 5 AddHistoryEntry methods in the original code. All of which took a lot of int parameters. One reason for the refactoring was that `AddHistory(0, 1, 45, 3);` doesn't really tell you much! AddHistoryEntry is not called from a tight loop, but it is widely used throughout the application. Corrections I've now updated the code examples as I had made a mistake with some of the parameters.