On Wednesday 28 April 2004 10:20, Doug Cutting wrote: > Christoph Goller wrote: > > However outside the package only the public > > constructor of Term can be called, which does the field.intern(). I > > donīt know how expensive the call to intern() really is. Maybe my > > worries are irrelevant. > > String.intern() is just a hash table lookup in most cases, and Java hash > tables are pretty fast. The constructor and object allocation will > easily dominate this.
Actually, there is unfortunately JNI call overhead always present, since intern() is a native method in String class (at least in Sun's implementation). I don't know how costly that is; maybe with newer JVMs it's less of an issue. It'd be nice if it did indeed use Java HashMaps (or even specialized symbol tables), and avoided JNI altogether. Hash tables are very fast (esp. with JDK 1.4+), although bit of memory hogs. Also, it'd be good if String object itself could just keep 'isInterned' flag, to return itself if it's a result of intern() (or is a String constant, which are always interned when loading classes in). This is one reason why many XML parsers rather use specialized symbol tables over plain intern() (another reason is that this way access can be done from char[], without having construct intermediate String). Nevertheless, overhead of calling intern() may well be negligible, since like you say, memory allocation (plus eventual GC'ing of object) is likely to be bigger performance concern. -+ Tatu +- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
