String output: format or concat in C#?

Let's say that you want to output or concat strings. Which of the following styles do you prefer?

• var p = new { FirstName = "Bill", LastName = "Gates" };

• Console.WriteLine("{0} {1}", p.FirstName, p.LastName);

• Console.WriteLine(p.FirstName + " " + p.LastName);

Do you rather use format or do you simply concat strings? What is your favorite? Is one of these hurting your eyes?

Do you have any rational arguments to use one and not the other?

I'd go for the second one.

I'm amazed that so many people immediately want to find the code that executes the fastest. If ONE MILLION iterations STILL take less than a second to process, is this going to be in ANY WAY noticeable to the end user? Not very likely.

Premature optimization = FAIL.

I'd go with the String.Format option, only because it makes the most sense from an architectural standpoint. I don't care about the performance until it becomes an issue (and if it did, I'd ask myself: Do I need to concatenate a million names at once? Surely they won't all fit on the screen...)

Consider if your customer later wants to change it so that they can configure whether to display "Firstname Lastname" or "Lastname, Firstname." With the Format option, this is easy - just swap out the format string. With the concat, you'll need extra code. Sure that doesn't sound like a big deal in this particular example but extrapolate.

Try this code.

It's a slightly modified version of your code.

1. I removed Console.WriteLine as it's probably a few orders of magnitude slower than what I'm trying to measure.
   
2. I'm starting the Stopwatch before the loop and stopping it right after, this way I'm not losing precision if the function takes for example 26.4 ticks to execute.
   
3. The way you divided the result by some iterations was wrong. See what happens if you have 1,000 milliseconds and 100 milliseconds. In both situations, you will get 0 ms after dividing it by 1,000,000.

Code:

Stopwatch s = new Stopwatch();

var p = new { FirstName = "Bill", LastName = "Gates" };

int n = 1000000;
long fElapsedMilliseconds = 0, fElapsedTicks = 0, cElapsedMilliseconds = 0, cElapsedTicks = 0;

string result;
s.Start();
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++)
    result = (p.FirstName + " " + p.LastName);
s.Stop();
cElapsedMilliseconds = s.ElapsedMilliseconds;
cElapsedTicks = s.ElapsedTicks;
s.Reset();
s.Start();
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++)
    result = string.Format("{0} {1}", p.FirstName, p.LastName);
s.Stop();
fElapsedMilliseconds = s.ElapsedMilliseconds;
fElapsedTicks = s.ElapsedTicks;
s.Reset();


Console.Clear();
Console.WriteLine(n.ToString()+" x result = string.Format(\"{0} {1}\", p.FirstName, p.LastName); took: " + (fElapsedMilliseconds) + "ms - " + (fElapsedTicks) + " ticks");
Console.WriteLine(n.ToString() + " x result = (p.FirstName + \" \" + p.LastName); took: " + (cElapsedMilliseconds) + "ms - " + (cElapsedTicks) + " ticks");
Thread.Sleep(4000);

Those are my results:

1000000 x result = string.Format("{0} {1}", p.FirstName, p.LastName); took: 618ms - 2213706 ticks
1000000 x result = (p.FirstName + " " + p.LastName); took: 166ms - 595610 ticks