Reference to a local variable object returned by a method is alive?

Question

I have an instance method getEmployee().
This method forms a local variable, Employee and returns it.
public Employee getEmployee()
Employee e = new Employee();
e.setSNo(sNo+=);
e.setMailBox();
return e;
There's another instance method in the same class that calls getEmployee() in this manner:-
Employee newEmployee = getEmployee();
newEmployee.printDetails();
I want to know whether the employee returned by getEmployee() is still alive when we are doing newEmployee.printDetails().
I am confused because in C, the lifetime of a local variable is limited only to the life time of the function. Once the function finishes, the local variable is considered garbage.
How does it work in case of Java?

Answer 1

No, It rarely has any use but can be used to unload things (from a cache for example). However I have never needed to do this. All I know is that finallizers can only be relied on to clear up memory. How or why you would do this is another question.
The GC runs when memory is low (not any other resource). It calls finalizers when it clears up objects. Therefore the only thing you can reliably release in a finalizer is memory. Other resources can become depleted without heap being depleated so you can't use finalizers to relialy clean up non-memory resources.
Anyway.
some more info on escape analysis
a compile time escape analysis
http://www.excelsior-usa.com/pdf/StackAlloc.pdf
This can handle some finalizers
This does not handle finalizers (marks them all as GLOBAL_ESCAPE
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/330000/320386/p1-choi.pdf?key1=320386&key2=0718563811&coll=Portal&dl=ACM&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618
bit more recent and about runtime optimization (finalizers not handled)
http://ssw.jku.at/Research/Papers/Ko05/Ko05.pdf
I don't think that not handling finalizers is too much of a problem. Most objects that will benifit from stackability are small objects anyway (especially the built in wrapper types). Most objects that have custom finalizers tend to be pretty complicated.
matfud