Garbage collection

[Roja Rani]

Hi All,

Is the following statement true or false?

Garbage collection mechanism is platform independent.

Please clarify.

[Steve Morrow]

The Truth About Garbage Collection
Reference Objects and Garbage Collection
Garbage collection and performance

[Swathi Sree]

Hi,

The link is good and is discussing about how Garbage collector marks the objects that are not reachable.

But I am not able to find whether Garbage collection is platform dependent or not?

[Steve Morrow]

The link is good and is discussing about how Garbage collector marks the objects that are not reachable.

But I am not able to find whether Garbage collection is platform dependent or not?

From the first link, paragraph A.1: the JVM is responsible for freeing unused memory.

So, depending on what you intend by your question, GC both is and is not platform dependent. JVMs are unique to particular platforms (i.e., a Mac JVM is for Mac, *nix for *nix, etc.), however the whole concept of a VM for Java supports platform independence.

Hope this helps.

[Akhilesh Trivedi]

I guess Java as a whole is Platform-Independent. It achieves this independency through JVMs which as steve said, are "platform-dependent".
There is separate JVM for linux, which converts byte codes as per linux platform, there is separate JVM for windows which converts byte codes as per windows environment, etc.

IMO,

Garbage collection is JVM dependent which in turn is platform dependent.

Correct me if I am wrong...
[ September 28, 2005: Message edited by: Akhil Trivedi ]

[A Kumar]

Hi,

You can think in this way...

Execution of Threads are dependent on the platform that they are running on....And Gc is also a thread ....so we can sum up....that Gc is indeed dependent on the platform that it is running on....

Correct Me if am wrong!!!

Regards

[Srinivasa Raghavan]

Kumar

Execution of Threads are dependent on the platform that they are running on....And Gc is also a thread ....so we can sum up....that Gc is indeed dependent on the platform that it is running on....

I feel you are wrong .. How you are relating, excecution of Thread with GC.

main() method is also executed by a Thread, So do you say it's platform dependent.

[A Kumar]

HI,


Thanks for pointing it out....