i had a discussion about the possible existence of a global "String pool" in newer versions of Java. turns out, there is no such thing. however, hardcoded strings are "pooled", i.e. String a and String b in the example are the *same instance of String*.

DoesStringPoolExist.java

String a = "test";
String b = "test";
System.out.println("a == b? " + (a == b)); // true

String c = "tester";
String d = a + "er";
System.out.println("c == d? " + (c == d)); // false

turns out, there IS a string pool after all. as i understand it, my test fails to prove its existence by design of the java developers.