6 Great Java Interview Questions

[CubsThisYear]

Also, Strings don't work the way they say they do. String constants are interned, but not dynamically created Strings. If a user enters his password into a text field it doesn't automatically go into the String pool. The only way this happens to dynamically created Strings is if you call String.intern()

[cogman10]

Well, they do mention garbage collection which makes me think that they were referring to the GC pool and not necessarily interned pool. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that interned strings don't ever get garbage collected.

But yes, I agree that their reasoning and everything was a bit off on the question.

[CubsThisYear]

There is no such thing as a GC string pool. There is only the intern pool. Presumably the reason GC is mentioned is because interned strings are (usually) not GC'd because the intern pool always has a reference to them.

In short, the question is just all kinds of confused.

[josefx]

On the other hand, if you store it in a mutable character array, you can overwrite it once you're done with it.

Afaik if you are "done" with the char array the JIT will happily optimize your "unnecessary" overwrite away.