* Nearly all declarations in this class are package-private,
   * accessed directly by subclasses.
   *
   * Table entries are of class Cell; a variant of AtomicLong padded
   * to reduce cache contention on most processors. Padding is
   * overkill for most Atomics because they are usually irregularly
   * scattered in memory and thus don't interfere much with each

   *     which case the input string is always returned.
   * @param padChar the character to insert at the beginning of the result until the minimum length
   *     is reached
   * @return the padded string
   */
  public static String padStart(String string, int minLength, char padChar) {
    checkNotNull(string); // eager for GWT.
    if (string.length() >= minLength) {
      return string;
    }