Java strings are byte[]'s if their contents contain only Latin-1 values (the first 256 codepoints of Unicode). This shipped in Java 9. JEP 254: Compact Strings

Java strings are byte[]'s if their contents contain only Latin-1 values (the first 256 codepoints of Unicode). This shipped in Java 9. JEP 254: Compact Strings https://openjdk.org/jeps/254 https://openjdk.org/jeps/254