> How will the difference impact String memory allocations? Looking at the
> String code, I can't see where it would make an impact.
This is from Lucene InputStream:
public final String readString() throws IOException {
int length = readVInt();
if (chars == null || length > chars.length)
chars = new char[length];
readChars(chars, 0, length);
return new String(chars, 0, length);
}
If you know the length in bytes, you still have to allocate that many chars
(even though the number of chars may be less than the number of bytes). Not
a big deal IMHO.
A bigger pain is on the writing side, where you can't stream things because
you don't know what the length is going to be (in either bytes *or* UTF-8
chars).
So it turns out that Java's 16 bit chars were just a waste... it's still a
multibyte format *and* it takes up more space. UTF-8 would have been nice -
no conversions necessary.
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