Java moves to copying for substrings

[monarch_dodra]

On Tuesday, 19 November 2013 at 05:38:14 UTC, Jesse Phillips
wrote:
> So apparently substrings were considered a common cause of 
> memory leaks.

I think it is pretty important to remember that slicing, while
giving you a small view, still holds the entire array.

I think there is nothing wrong with pipping a ".dup" every now
and then, after slicing something.

As a matter of fact, I've been playing around with transcoding
strings (UTF-8/16/32). I start by allocating a large buffer to
write into. When I'm done, I look at the buffer's useage, and if
it's too low, I return a dup of the buffer slice, allowing the GC
to reclaim the original buffer. Not only does this take up less
memory, but overall, I actually get better run-times too (!)