title: Performance of the Number class
body: <p>I'm just wondering about the performance of the Number class as opposed to, say using generics or even a whole lot of functions to handle primitive types.</p>
  
  <p>The primitive types would clearly be the fastest option I would assume, however if the performance hit is not too huge, it would likely be easier for the coder to just use the Number class or generics rather than making a function that accepts and returns long, double (etc).</p>
  
  <p>I am about to do a performance benchmark of the 3 options mentioned. Is there anything I should be aware of/try out when doing this, or even better, has someone done this before that they can give me results to?</p>