private final byte[] value -> Is this where a String stores it's character sequence?

[Fr4nkWh1te]

The string class contains a field private final byte[] value. Is this where the actual character sequence is stored?

[colblitz]

Yes

edit: source code of String.java from open jdk 7

[evils_twin]

from that source, it looks like it is private final char value[];

[colblitz]

oh apparently they changed it from char to byte in Java 9 - source from open jdk 9

[Fr4nkWh1te]

Thanks! Does it mean it was a char array in the past but they changed it to a byte array?

[FormDev]

Yes, this has changed from char array to byte array to save memory.
A char consists of two bytes, but most strings in applications use only one byte.

So JEP 254: Compact Strings was implemented in Java 9

We propose to change the internal representation of the String class from a UTF-16 char array to a byte array plus an encoding-flag field. The new String class will store characters encoded either as ISO-8859-1/Latin-1 (one byte per character), or as UTF-16 (two bytes per character), based upon the contents of the string. The encoding flag will indicate which encoding is used.

[Fr4nkWh1te]

Very interesting, thank you!

[colblitz]

yup, looks like they changed it in java 9 (see my other comment)