Java’s GC considers objects “garbage” if they aren’t reachable through a chain starting at a garbage collection root, so these objects will be collected. Even though objects may point to each other to form a cycle, they’re still garbage if they’re cut off from the root. See the section on unreachable objects in Appendix A: … Read more
A similar question was asked, but it didn’t ask about statics. Summary of what static, heap, and stack memory are: A static variable is basically a global variable, even if you cannot access it globally. Usually there is an address for it that is in the executable itself. There is only one copy for the … Read more
Full disclosure – I’m the author of the previously mentioned talk in TLV DroidCon. I had a chance to examine this issue across many Android applications, and discuss it with other developers who encountered it – and we all got to the same point: this issue cannot be avoided, only minimized. I took a closer … Read more
You are being tripped up here and drawing very wrong conclusions because you are using a debugger. You’ll need to run your code the way it runs on your user’s machine. Switch to the Release build first with Build + Configuration manager, change the “Active solution configuration” combo in the upper left corner to “Release”. … Read more
For the specific question “Will pClass be garbage collected”: the event subscription has no effect on the collection of pClass (as the publisher). For GC in general (in particular, the target): it depends whether MyFunction is static or instance-based. A delegate (such as an event subscription) to an instance method includes a reference to the … Read more
If you have good reason to believe that a significant set of objects – particularly those you suspect to be in generations 1 and 2 – are now eligible for garbage collection, and that now would be an appropriate time to collect in terms of the small performance hit. A good example of this is … Read more
Every new developer who comes to Objective-C has to learn the rigid rules of when to retain, release, and autorelease objects. These rules even specify naming conventions that imply the retain count of objects returned from methods. Memory management in Objective-C becomes second nature once you take these rules to heart and apply them consistently, … Read more
Your best option is to call System.gc() which simply is a hint to the garbage collector that you want it to do a collection. There is no way to force and immediate collection though as the garbage collector is non-deterministic.
Implicit garbage collection could have been added in, but it just didn’t make the cut. Probably due to not just implementation complications, but also due to people not being able to come to a general consensus fast enough. A quote from Bjarne Stroustrup himself: I had hoped that a garbage collector which could be optionally … Read more
Eric Lippert wrote a detailed blog post about this subject a while back (additionally comparing it to VBScript). More accurately, he wrote about JScript, which is Microsoft’s own implementation of ECMAScript, although very similar to JavaScript. I would imagine that you can assume the vast majority of behaviour would be the same for the JavaScript … Read more