title: What is the Big O complexity of Autoboxing
body: <p>I know that we always talk about a performance hit when autoboxing, but I would like to know if that affects the Big O complexity of an algorithm.</p>
  
  <p>The Java implementation of the constructor for the Character class is :</p>
  
  <pre><code>public Character(char value) {
      this.value = value;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The constructor is constant time so it really comes down to object creation.  Would object creation affect Big O time?  For instance if you are putting the chars of a <code>String</code> into a <code>HashSet&lt;Character&gt;</code> would that still be O(n) where n is the # of chars in the String?</p>