Objects, garbage collection and Threads question

[Maximilian]

Just to clarify if i run this it creates 20 objects and 19 of them are garbage collected because only the final one has a reference yeah?

for (int count = 0; count <20; count ++)
{
	MyObject jerry = new MyObject();
}

If that's true then are Thread objects special in some way? What prevents a Thread from being garbage collected when it has no reference?

 

[postmortemIA]

none of them have reference, they are not accessible outside of the for loop.

 

[Cogman]

References to the current running thread do exist in java

http://www.roseindia.net/java/java-get-example/get-current-thread.shtml

I don't know if that is what keeps it from being garbage collected (it might be ignored or something), but that should be enough to keep it from being garbage collected.

 

[Merad]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2423284/java-thread-garbage-collected-or-not

 

[Maximilian]

Aha yeah i suppose there must be a reference somewhere, that probably how the Thread.currentThread() method works.

 

[BrightCandle]

Threads are the root of garbage collection, they count as the places where things can be referenced from. Your basic GC algorithm iterates the threads, and in each goes through any references on the stack frame and marks all the objects found. Then you go through any static values and mark those. Everything else is junk.

So threads are different because they are a first class root in the garbage collector.

 

[Fallen Kell]

If you are talking C or C++, there is no garbage collection occurring.