http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=49314
--- Comment #5 from ro at CeBiTec dot Uni-Bielefeld.DE <ro at CeBiTec dot Uni-Bielefeld.DE> 2011-06-16 20:51:00 UTC --- > It has been a while, but I think either _Jv_NewStringUTF > or _Jv_NewStringUtf8Const. IIRC one of these is run > during class initialization to turn string constants into > String objects. Thanks. It turned out those were ok. When I logged calls to JvNewByteArray, I found two: JvNewByteArray: length = 1 JvNewByteArray: length = 0 The first one is as expected for "a", the second seems fishy: at the end of java::lang::String::getBytes, bufpos was 0 and buflen 1, so a new empty buffer was returned. Looking further, this is a problem with iconv somehow: in gnu::gcj::convert::Output_iconv::write, iconv_adapter returns -1 with errno == EILSEQ. Not understanding this iconv business at all, I have no idea how this can happen. Rainer