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  1. JDK
  2. JDK-8055183

Decide whether this can be GCed

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    • Enhancement
    • Resolution: Duplicate
    • P3
    • 9
    • 9
    • hotspot
    • None
    • gc
    • generic
    • generic

    Description

      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.

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              dl Doug Lea
              jtulach Jaroslav Tulach (Inactive)
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