GC of object with loopback references

Question

Can someone answer this please : when there is a loopback of object references that are created in a method scope, will the objects be GCed ? For example, suppose we have this situation of objects: A -> B -> C -> A and they are created in a method like this:
public void foo() {
A a = new A();
B b = new B();
C c = new C();
a.set(b); //a has ref to b
b.set(c); //b has ref to c
c.set(a); //c has ref back to a
When I come out of the foo() method, will the objects a, b and c be GCed ?

Answer 1

radiatejava wrote:
Can someone answer this please : when there is a loopback of object references that are created in a method scope, will the objects be GCed ? ...The short answer is yes. Cycles can be a problem for reference counting garbage collectors; however, I'm not aware of any mainstream JVM that uses a reference counting GC. Sun's JVMs (SE, ME, realtime) use tracing collectors, which are not affected by reference cycles.
Python, on the other hand, uses a reference counting GC, so python programmers should avoid creating cyclic references.