How is String concatenation implemented in Java 9?

Question

As written in JEP 280: Indify String Concatenation:

Change the static String-concatenation bytecode sequence generated by javac to use invokedynamic calls to JDK library functions. This will enable future optimizations of String concatenation without requiring further changes to the bytecode emmited by javac.

Here I want to understand what the use of invokedynamic calls is and how bytecode concatenation is different from invokedynamic?

Answer 1

The "old" way output a bunch of StringBuilder-oriented operations. Consider this program:

public class Example {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String result = args[0] + "-" + args[1] + "-" + args[2];
        System.out.println(result);
    }
}

If we compile that with JDK 8 or earlier and then use javap -c Example to see the bytecode, we see something like this:

public class Example {
  public Example();
    Code:
       0: aload_0
       1: invokespecial #1                  // Method java/lang/Object."<init>":()V
       4: return

  public static void main(java.lang.String[]);
    Code:
       0: new           #2                  // class java/lang/StringBuilder
       3: dup
       4: invokespecial #3                  // Method java/lang/StringBuilder."<init>":()V
       7: aload_0
       8: iconst_0
       9: aaload
      10: invokevirtual #4                  // Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
      13: ldc           #5                  // String -
      15: invokevirtual #4                  // Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
      18: aload_0
      19: iconst_1
      20: aaload
      21: invokevirtual #4                  // Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
      24: ldc           #5                  // String -
      26: invokevirtual #4                  // Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
      29: aload_0
      30: iconst_2
      31: aaload
      32: invokevirtual #4                  // Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
      35: invokevirtual #6                  // Method java/lang/StringBuilder.toString:()Ljava/lang/String;
      38: astore_1
      39: getstatic     #7                  // Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream;
      42: aload_1
      43: invokevirtual #8                  // Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(Ljava/lang/String;)V
      46: return
}

As you can see, it creates a StringBuilder and uses append. This is famous fairly inefficient as the default capacity of the built-in buffer in StringBuilder is only 16 chars, and there's no way for the compiler to know to allocate more in advance, so it ends up having to reallocate. It's also a bunch of method calls. (Note that the JVM can sometimes detect and rewrite these patterns of calls to make them more efficient, though.)

Let's look at what Java 9 generates:

public class Example {
  public Example();
    Code:
       0: aload_0
       1: invokespecial #1                  // Method java/lang/Object."<init>":()V
       4: return

  public static void main(java.lang.String[]);
    Code:
       0: aload_0
       1: iconst_0
       2: aaload
       3: aload_0
       4: iconst_1
       5: aaload
       6: aload_0
       7: iconst_2
       8: aaload
       9: invokedynamic #2,  0              // InvokeDynamic #0:makeConcatWithConstants:(Ljava/lang/String;Ljava/lang/String;Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/String;
      14: astore_1
      15: getstatic     #3                  // Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream;
      18: aload_1
      19: invokevirtual #4                  // Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(Ljava/lang/String;)V
      22: return
}

Oh my but that's shorter. :-) It makes a single call to makeConcatWithConstants from StringConcatFactory, which says this in its Javadoc:

Methods to facilitate the creation of String concatenation methods, that can be used to efficiently concatenate a known number of arguments of known types, possibly after type adaptation and partial evaluation of arguments. These methods are typically used as bootstrap methods for invokedynamic call sites, to support the string concatenation feature of the Java Programming Language.