You are correct; strings in the intern pool will never be GC'd.

However, most strings on not interned.
String literals are interned, and strings passed to String.intern() are interned, but all other strings are not interned and can be GC'd normally.

You are correct: strings in the intern pool will never be GC'd.

However, most strings are not interned.
String literals are interned, and strings passed to String.intern() are interned, but all other strings are not interned and can be GC'd normally.