[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Why internalize? (was Re: SAX2: Namespace proposal)
Joe Lapp <jlapp@w...> writes: > I'm just questioning the use of intern in document APIs. We > use a special name object instead and force the app to select > the appropriate name object to hand to the API. That's another type of interning. It's important to remember that while fast comparisons are a nice side-benefit, the main purpose of interning strings or other objects is to guarantee that there is never more than one equivalent object allocated -- otherwise, you can waste an awful lot of memory. To take one example, consider an attribute "security-level", allowed for every element in a document, and with a default value. If your document has 5,000 elements (not an unusually large document), then without some kind of internalization mechanism, you will end up allocating 5,000 separate String objects, all with the value "security-level". If you internalize (somehow), then you have only one String object (or compound Name object in Joe's case) that is shared throughout the tree. Internalizing can be tricky with mutable objects, but with immutable objects like java.lang.String, it's a big win in this problem domain. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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