What’s the advantage of a String being Immutable?

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Immutability (for strings or other types) can have numerous advantages:

  • It makes it easier to reason about the code, since you can make assumptions about variables and arguments that you can’t otherwise make.
  • It simplifies multithreaded programming since reading from a type that cannot change is always safe to do concurrently.
  • It allows for a reduction of memory usage by allowing identical values to be combined together and referenced from multiple locations. Both Java and C# perform string interning to reduce the memory cost of literal strings embedded in code.
  • It simplifies the design and implementation of certain algorithms (such as those employing backtracking or value-space partitioning) because previously computed state can be reused later.
  • Immutability is a foundational principle in many functional programming languages – it allows code to be viewed as a series of transformations from one representation to another, rather than a sequence of mutations.

Immutable strings also help avoid the temptation of using strings as buffers. Many defects in C/C++ programs relate to buffer overrun problems resulting from using naked character arrays to compose or modify string values. Treating strings as a mutable types encourages using types better suited for buffer manipulation (see StringBuilder in .NET or Java).

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