It's not the comparison that's slow, it's the method lookup. String equality bypasses method lookup, so the slightly slower comparison is irrelevant. Also, very

It's not the comparison that's slow, it's the method lookup. String equality bypasses method lookup, so the slightly slower comparison is irrelevant. Also, very small strings are inlined into the object and will have been loaded along with the cache line that accessed the object, so the string bytes themselves are already in cache - and the slow comparison doesn't matter much.