Why String is final or Immutable in Java ?

1) String Pool

String is going to be most used data type in all kind of Java applications.One of key step on that direction was idea of storing String literals in String pool. Goal was to reduce temporary String object by sharing them and in order to share, they must have to be from Immutable class. You can not share a mutable object with two parties which are unknown to each other.Example, where two reference variable is pointing to same String object:

String s1 = "Java";

String s2 = "Java";

Now if s1 changes the object from "Java" to "C++", reference variable also got value s2="C++", which it doesn't even know about it. By making String immutable, this sharing of String literal was possible. In short, key idea of String pool can not be implemented without making String final or Immutable in Java.

2) Security

String has been widely used as parameter for many Java classes, e.g. for opening network connection, you can pass host and port as String, for reading files in Java you can pass path of files and directory as String and for opening database connection, you can pass database URL as String.

If String was not immutable, a user might have granted to access a particular file in system, but after authentication he can change the PATH to something else, this could cause serious security issues. Similarly, while connecting to database or any other machine in network, mutating String value can pose security threats.

3) Use of String in Class Loading Mechanism

Another reason for making String final or Immutable was driven by the fact that it was heavily used in class loading mechanism. As String been not Immutable, an attacker can take advantage of this fact and a request to load standard Java classes e.g. java.io.Reader can be changed to malicious class com.unknown.DataStolenReader. By keeping String final and immutable, we can at least be sure that JVM is loading correct classes.

4) Multithreading Benefits

Since Concurrency and Multi-threading was Java's key offering, it made lot of sense to think about thread-safety of String objects. Since it was expected that String will be used widely, making it Immutable means no external synchronization, means much cleaner code involving sharing of String between multiple threads. This single feature, makes already complicate, confusing and error prone concurrency coding much easier. Because String is immutable and we just share it between threads, it result in more readable code.

5) Optimization and Performance

Now when you make a class Immutable, you know in advance that, this class is not going to change once created. This guarantee open path for many performance optimization e.g. caching. String itself know that, I am not going to change, so String cache its hashcode. It even calculate hashcode lazily and once created, just cache it. In simple world, when you first call hashCode() method of any String object, it calculate hash code and all subsequent call to hashCode() returns already calculated, cached value. This results in good performance gain, given String is heavily used in hash based Maps e.g. Hashtable and HashMap. Caching of hashcode was not possible without making it immutable and final, as it depends upon content of String itself.