Some questions about String interning for primitives

[dfranken.jdk at gmail.com]

Dear readers,

Apologies in advance if these questions have been asked and discussed
before or if they are on the wrong mailing list, maybe they are more
suited for project Valhalla, I'm not sure.

I was wondering if it would be possible / feasible to intern primitive
values and byte arrays and use these interned values instead of
creating a new object for each conversion.

Currently, the following code prints 'false' as s1 and s2 are
references to different objects:

  String s1 = Integer.toString(1);
  s1 = s1.intern(); // Makes no difference whether intern is called
  String s2 = Integer.toString(1);
  System.out.println(s1 == s2);

I know that there is an integer cache for boxing / unboxing commonly
used integers (for numbers ranging from -128 to 127), how about a
String cache for commonly converted primitives? We could use the same
ranges initially.

I.e. when I use Integer.toString(1) I don't really care if I get a
newly allocated String, I only care that I get back a String which
equals "1" and it's okay if that is a reference to an interned value.
Likewise with the mirrored variants such as String.valueOf(..).

I was also wondering how byte conversions could work with such a cache.
Currently, the only way for me to go from bytes to a String is with 
new String(bytes, charset) which guarantees creation of a new String
object each time. Well, what if the bytes often contain the same value?

Would it be useful to be able to do:
  
  String s1 = String.valueOf(bytes, UTF_8);
  String s2 = String.valueOf(bytes, UTF_8); // <-- returns the same
refrence as s1

Kind regards,

Dave Franken