Hi BCEL developers, We use BCEL library to inspect Java class. Thank you for the great library.
When our tool checks classes in ~200 jar files, it creates more than 2 million BCEL ConstantUtf8 instances. I suspect many of them share the same values such as "java.lang.String". [image: many_constant_utf8.png] Given this observation, I got an idea to to reuse ConstantUtf8 with same value to save memory footprint. Because ConstantUtf8 is constant, sharing the instances across classes should not cause a problem. Note that BCEL is not designed thread-safe (doc <https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-bcel/faq.html>). If this is a good idea, I'm thinking to make a pull request around BCEL's ConstantUtf8.getInstance method: https://github.com/apache/commons-bcel/blob/master/src/main/java/org/apache/bcel/classfile/ConstantUtf8.java#L116 Does anybody have any thought? -- Regards, Tomo
