I love hearing more about this, especially the historical context, but don't have a good java writeups/articles on this. Would you mind sharing some suggestions/pointers? I'd very much appreciate it.
A good starting point is Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java. He shares some stories there from Java’s early days, and - at least in passing - mentions some aspects of the String class’s history.
Ah, I certainly remember these anecdotes! What other resources would you recommend(even the tidbits) could there be for more modern Java? The original article like this one should be treasured.
String compression was one. tl;dr: the JVM supports Unicode for strings, but uses 1-byte chars for strings where possible (previously it was UTF-16), even though it's not actually doing UTF-8.
Depending on what sort of document you're looking for, you might like either the JEP: https://openjdk.org/jeps/254
(I think I saw a feature article about the implementation of the string compression feature, but I'm not sure who wrote it or where it was, or if I'm thinking about something else. Actually I think it might've been https://shipilev.net/blog/2015/black-magic-method-dispatch/, despite the title.)
Absolutely love it. Thanks a lot. A fancy hit me yesterday and I've been looking through JDK's String commit history to see little tidbits that I could grab.
Shipilev's website looks like a fascinating resource. I appreciate the pointer!
