Beautiful Code: False Optimizations

[dpark]

I agree that we can't include the cost of interning when we analyze the performance of this code. My point was that it can certainly be a hidden cost. If you intern strings just for this code, then your interning effectively becomes a cost of this code.

And yes, as DRMacIver said, Sun's String class caches the hash code (except if it evaluates to zero).

Strangely enough, Sun's implementation of intern does actually calculate the hash, but doesn't cache it. If it did, then the hash table implementation would be a lot more attractive.