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Comment by niuzeta | Hacker News Reader

I love hearing more about this, especially the historical context, but don't have a good java writeups/articles on this. Would you mind sharing some suggestions/pointers? I'd very much appreciate it.

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A good starting point is Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java. He shares some stories there from Java’s early days, and - at least in passing - mentions some aspects of the String class’s history.

Ah, I certainly remember these anecdotes! What other resources would you recommend(even the tidbits) could there be for more modern Java? The original article like this one should be treasured.

String compression was one. tl;dr: the JVM supports Unicode for strings, but uses 1-byte chars for strings where possible (previously it was UTF-16), even though it's not actually doing UTF-8.

Depending on what sort of document you're looking for, you might like either the JEP: https://openjdk.org/jeps/254

or Shipilev's slides (pdf warning): https://shipilev.net/talks/jfokus-Feb2016-lord-of-the-string...

Shipilev's website (https://shipilev.net/#lord-of-the-strings), and links from the JEP above to other JEPS, are both good places to find further reading.

(I think I saw a feature article about the implementation of the string compression feature, but I'm not sure who wrote it or where it was, or if I'm thinking about something else. Actually I think it might've been https://shipilev.net/blog/2015/black-magic-method-dispatch/, despite the title.)

Absolutely love it. Thanks a lot. A fancy hit me yesterday and I've been looking through JDK's String commit history to see little tidbits that I could grab.

Shipilev's website looks like a fascinating resource. I appreciate the pointer!

This is a good video that goes over a ton of the optimizations, especially around concatenation: https://youtu.be/z3yu1kjtcok?si=mOdZ5sh5rp8LNyap

I appreciate it! I will take a look this weekend,

> Would you mind sharing some suggestions/pointers?

I would, but unfortunately I got a NullPointerException.

I suggest you try Rust instead; its borrow checker will ensure you can't share pointers in an unsafe manner.

I know it's a tongue in cheek reply but..

You can't share "pointers" in an unsafe manner in Java. Even data races are completely memory safe.

I did laugh, so there is that.

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