When examining the content of a .class file from a Kotlin source (just "Hello World", nothing else) I found an UTF-8 string within the constant pool that is (a) not used anywhere and (b) with strange content.
Can any tell me what this is?
When examining the content of a .class file from a Kotlin source (just "Hello World", nothing else) I found an UTF-8 string within the constant pool that is (a) not used anywhere and (b) with strange content.
Can any tell me what this is?

This is the content of
kotlin.Metadataannotation. It is coded with Protobuf and used by both compiler and Kotlin-Reflect.Kotlin uses
Stringinstead ofbyte[]because class format is very wasteful at storing arrays.When you are not using Kotlin-Reflect, metadata is unused and can be removed by ProGuard.