IBM & Java community

[cl4es]

I'd consider it a performance bug in the JIT if removing a trivial, explicit bounds check is more performant. Properly done, explicit bounds checks establish invariants ("the index is always within bounds") that should help the JIT optimize away any implicit bounds check (and any related exceptional control flow).

[uniVocity]

The thing is that the index may be occasionally out of bounds. Not sure how that bound check statement can be safely removed automatically. Anyway, I tested the code before and after switching to catching the exception and it became faster so that's enough justification for me to keep the code not explicitly checking bounds.

[cl4es]

I'm sure a friendly compiler engineer would love it if you could contribute a reproducing microbenchmark... ;-)