primitives and garbage collection

[anagha patankar]

as I understand primitives and object references are stored on the stack while the actual objects are stored on the garbage collectible heap .

Question being - so does this mean that the primitives on stack are never removed - are they ever garbage collected ?.

Regards,
-anagha

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

That's right. Primitives on the stack are not garbage collected. But as soon as a method returns, the stack it used is eligible to be re-used -- the stack memory is simply overwritten. That's how a program stack works.