Approaches presented herein enable providing online method handle deduplication by determining whether a method handle to be created is equivalent to an existing method handle in an equivalence pool. Specifically, in response to a request to create a method handle, a set of parameters including a method handle map, a class, and one or more arguments of the method handle to be created are accepted. A method handle of the class is obtained. One or more existing unique method handles found in an equivalence pool are compared to the method handle to be created to determine whether an equivalence exists. When an equivalence is found between an existing unique method handle and the method handle to be created, the existing unique method handle is returned.