IIRC, that used to be the case, but recent Java releases changed it so that memory is no longer shared with substrings. The former behavior could cause some ext

IIRC, that used to be the case, but recent Java releases changed it so that memory is no longer shared with substrings. The former behavior could cause some extreme memory leaks (unless you were very careful to always manually duplicate each substring); a one-character substring could keep a multi-megabyte memory allocation alive. See for instance https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33893655/string-substring-making-a-copy-of-the-underlying-char-value https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33893655/string-substrin... which discusses this issue.