Groovy performance : iterating with closure vs loop

Toady while listening to this video I discovered an interesting fact about usage of closure vs regular loop for iterating over list. So I wrote a quick test to confirm and yes loops outperform closures in terms of performance in case of iterating over a list.

But in a slightly similar case of File.eachLine{} vs loading file in a list and then iterating with for, the closure still works out faster on the whole. I have not tested this for different file sizes, but damn, whatever it may be new File(file).eachLine{} just rocks :)

Here is the github gist, to get the latest version of code.

def file = "input.txt"
// just to heat up the jvm :)
new File(file).eachLine{
    it.toUpperCase()
}

// with closure
start = System.nanoTime()
new File(file).eachLine{
    it.toUpperCase()
}
println System.nanoTime() - start

// with loop
start = System.nanoTime()
lines = new File(file).readLines()
for (line in lines){
    line.toUpperCase()
}
println System.nanoTime() - start

// read lines into a list
lines = new File(file).readLines()

// with list.each {}
start = System.nanoTime()
lines.each { line->
    line.toUpperCase()
}
println System.nanoTime() - start

// with loop over list
start = System.nanoTime()
for (line in lines){
    line.toUpperCase()
}
println System.nanoTime() - start

Results (with groovy-1.8.0 and jdk-1.6)

 Run # 1   Run # 2   Run # 3   Run # 4
 4792229   4773791   4840280   5428064
11169576  10254934  10791595  12546008
 2638604   2424610   2477969   2466514
  465702    315403    315403    412063