For loop VS While Loop – which is faster ?

Many times I have come across a very basic question Whether For loop is faster ? or While loop is faster in C and other languages. Most of the times an unexperienced developers use to ask this question to me. So I thought to write an article on this .

The answer to this question is – there are no difference in performance , both For and While loop perform same , but this may differ a little for different compilers. It may slightly differ for different compilers because it depends on how a compiler compiles and generates machine code for the same. Even thought those factors are negligible .

I managed to figure it out by looking into the intermediate assembly code generated for both For loop and while loop. Looking at the assembly instructions generated for both , it shows that both have similarly equal number of instructions and similar instructions.

Instead of explaining it in text, I am posting screenshot of assembly code generated with marking of details. The assembly code is generated in Mac OS X , XCode by using Assemble option.

For Loop Assembly Code
For Loop Assembly Code

 

While Loop assembly code
While Loop assembly code

 

 

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