javagarbage-collectionfinalizer

Reference to object during finalize

What happens if you save a reference to the current object during the finalize call? For example:

class foo {
    ...
    public void finalize() {
        bar.REFERENCE = this;
    }
}

Is the object garbage-collected, or not? What happens when you try to access bar.REFERENCE later?

Solution

  • The object is not garbage collected. This is know as "Object resurrection".

    You must be careful with that, once the finalizer is called the gc won't call it again, on some enviroments like .NET you can re-register the finalizer but i'm not sure about java