Object leaks in java.

Here is what I think of Java parameter passing conventions.

At programmer's level, Java is said to pass objects by reference and primitives by value. This means for references, what the callee receives is a  heap address of the object, and the object references themselves are actually passed by value. This also means Java saves some space and effort in copying the entire object onto the subroutine linkage channel (for example stack memory).

By definition, pass by reference means 'a parameter passing convention where the lvalue of the actual parameter (argument) is assigned to the lvalue of the formal parameter.'

When passed by reference, the callee method can manipulate the original object’s attributes, can invoke the methods of the object, can re-new, re-assign and purge the components of a composite object thus passed. These operations affect the original reference of the caller, because we have only one object in the heap, which are pointed to by both of these references.

For destroying an object, the C++ way is to 'delete' the object, and the C way is to 'free' the pointer. If passed by reference or address, both these languages have the flexibility of cleaning the object or a structure from anywhere in the caller-callee chain. The invalidation of an object indirectly invalidates other references or pointers cached elsewhere in the stack locations, and trying to reuse those references or pointers results in a crash.

This is different in java. Since there is no explicit freeing of objects, we rely on null assignment on the reference, which is the only way to force an object cleanup. Even after the callee nullifies an object, the object lives through the caller's reference. This means that an object cannot be freed (or initiated for freeing) from an assignee reference, when the a peer reference is alive, and vice versa.

This may be a conscious design to eliminate bad references and make sure that all the object references are either null or a valid object's address. This is because, in the garbage collection, the memory of unreferenced objects are not really freed into the system, rather kept in the internal free pool, and is still mapped into the process, and is accessible through stale references, and such a bad dangling pointer will actually cause more damage than a crash.

But then how to clean up an unwanted java object? Set your object reference to null and wait for a gc to occur? might not work because, if there is a second reference elsewhere in the stacks and registers, consciously or unknowingly, the object is not collected. Consequently, many of the objects the programmer has explicitly discarded will lay remnant in the heap until the last reference of the object also went out of scope. This may be sooner or later, or never.

Many of the memory leaks including the infamous Classloader leaks can be attributed to this 'hidden and under-documented' behavior of java. And this is the very reason we see more OutOfMemoryErrors than NullPointerExceptions.