Following up on the thread about the massive overhead of String, I tried 
writing a string collection type that stores strings as bytes, converting 
to String on-demand. It seems to work. Memory footprint and performance are 
good for the application.

The hard part was trying to track down the correct interfaces and 
invocations. I note that "Clojure Programming" makes the same observation 
in the section about clojure abstractions: "such things are largely 
undocumented". I guess this situation hasn't improved? I had to proceed 
mostly by experimentation, and am still unclear on, for example, why I 
needed to use an interop call in some places (like cons), but should not in 
others.

Would be happy for any feedback on this attempt:

(deftype StringVec [pv]
  clojure.lang.IPersistentVector
  (seq [self] (map #(String. ^bytes %) pv))
  (nth [self i] (String. ^bytes (.nth ^clojure.lang.IPersistentVector pv 
i)))
  (nth [self i notfound] (String. ^bytes (.nth 
^clojure.lang.IPersistentVector pv i (.getBytes ^String notfound))))
  clojure.lang.ILookup
  (valAt [self i] (when-let [res (.valAt ^clojure.lang.IPersistentVector pv 
i)]
                    (String. ^bytes res)))
  (valAt [self i notfound] (String. ^bytes (.valAt 
^clojure.lang.IPersistentVector pv i (.getBytes ^String notfound))))
  clojure.lang.ISeq
  (first [self] (String. ^bytes (first pv)))
  (next [self] (->StringVec (next pv)))
  (more [self] (->StringVec (rest pv)))
  (cons [self s] (->StringVec (.cons ^clojure.lang.IPersistentVector pv 
(.getBytes ^String s))))
  (count [self] (count pv))
  Object
  (toString [self] (str (into [] self))))

(defn stringvec [coll]
  (into (->StringVec []) coll))

(defmethod print-method StringVec [v, ^java.io.Writer w]
  (.write w (.toString ^StringVec v)))

Speak of cons, I gather ISeq cons is unrelated to cons, the function, but 
rather is required for conj?

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