Destroying a thread

[Glade Wishart]

I have previously understood that when a thread is done processing it is automatically destroyed is this true without explicitly calling the Destroy() method or is it similar to garbage collection where you may be able to suggest garbage collection but it only occurs when the virtual machine is ready?

[Jim Yingst]

The latter. In fact this is garbage collection - the Thread object can only be freed from memory if there aren't any other (reachable) references to it. Some (many?) of the internal resources associated with running a thread may well be freed as soon as the thread completes the run() method - but the Thread object itself is dependent on GC.