It turned out during discussion about lightweight finalization (see JDK-8051843) that people often blame finalization for misbehavior which is not necessarily related to finalization, rather to VM behavior. In my opinion (as expressed at http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2014-August/028215.html ) it boils down to question whether following method can finish or not:

    private void gcThis() {
        Reference<?> ref = new WeakReference<>(this);
        while (ref.get() != null) {
            System.gc();
        }
        System.err.println("ref is gone: " + ref);
    }

my personal suggestion is that it should never finish, however I am not the right person to decide that. Rather I just report this issue to track the decision made by others. I just want to express my developer wish: sometimes I want "this" to not be GCed while its instance method is running and it would be nice to have cross VM way to enforce that.