Huh. I assumed that all languages with immutable strings did this sort of thing transparently Edit: according to another comment, it sort of can > In today's

Huh. I assumed that all languages with immutable strings did this sort of thing transparently Edit: according to another comment, it sort of can > In today's JVM, if you are using the G1 garbage collector, you can get 99% of the memory savings almost completely for free with a VM parameter: You still pay for an extra object, just pointed to the same character array underneath.