I'm not convinced it's legal and correct. You're going to risk breaking internal JVM optimisations like string interning. Whether it's specifically against the

I'm not convinced it's legal and correct. You're going to risk breaking internal JVM optimisations like string interning. Whether it's specifically against the letter of the law I'm not sure, but I imagine the Java specification doesn't have much to say about the behaviour of a JVM after someone messes with its internals. That is to say, very roughly speaking, you're likely flirting with what C programmers call undefined behaviour, which is to say, it's likely not legal and correct. https://stackoverflow.com/a/6932880/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/6932880/