End position storage in javac

[Jonathan Gibbons]

Names are (have always been) uniquified.  IIRC, back in the day, interned strings were less efficient than now and never GC-ed.  Now, an impediment is that `Name` has effectively leaked into the public API, via `javax.lang.model` and would be hard to replace.

Generally, this "version" of javac dates back to JDK 3/JDK 4 days, when standard collections were less pervasive, and software engineering was ever so much simpler, both in terms of impl design and tools (who remembers emacs?). That being said, it is a testament to that early design that it has endured so long with many pervasive incremental upgrades.

-- Jon

On Thu, Nov 27, 2025, at 5:45 AM, Maurizio Cimadamore wrote:
> For names I'm less sure, 
> but maybe somebody else knows the answer there.
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