Why This Single Line of Code Made Me Question Everything About Enums in Java

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I spent around 10 minutes debugging a test failure, Finally, I discovered the culprit was a single line:

if (color.equals(Color.RED)) { ... }  

The test passed when I changed it to ==.

Staring at == and equals(), wondering which path to take.

Photo by Nachristos on Unsplash

Enums

Enums are like immortal twins — each born once, forever recognizable by their face, not their name.

Each enum constant is an instance of the enum type, and these instances are singletons. This means that there is only one instance of each enum constant in the JVM, which has important implications for comparison.

public enum Color { RED, GREEN, BLUE }

Here, RED isn’t just a value. It’s a singular being, etched into memory when the JVM wakes. No clones, no imposters. Just one RED, one GREEN, one BLUE—eternal, unchanging.

This truth changes everything about how we compare them.

Comparing Enums with ==