In short:
- The memory of the String object consists of 24 bytes for metadata + the number of characters times 1 byte or 2 bytes depending on the coder value
- Metadata: mark word x2 (4 bytes x2 = 8 bytes), class word (4 bytes), array reference byte[] or char[] (4 byte), hash (4 byte), hashIsZero (1 byte), coder (1 byte), padding (2 byte)
- The String object has 2 additional flags:
- when
coder =1 then UTF-16 encoding (2 bytes per character) - when
coder = 0 then LATIN-1 encoding (1 byte per character) - hashIsZero is a flag that tells whether the hash calculation has already been performed
