When does GC clean up

Question

Hi,
Beginning in Java I'm still confused on when does GC clean up and under what conditions. Suppose following code where I increase the length of an int array:
     int[] tmp = foo;
     foo = new int[newCapacity];
     int i = 0;
     while (i < tmp.length)
          foo[i] = tmp[i++];Here foo is allocating new memory, but at that moment tmp is a pointer to the original value of foo. After the new memory allocation the copy is made.
Is there a possibility that the GC free the memory of foo because it dont know that there is another pointer pointed to it ?

Answer 1

Hi,
The GC is smarter than you apparantly think it is.Thanks, because I was worry about that. After a few
day's of Java I getting to like it, however I'm worry
about a GC thing that do things where I have no
control over it :( But you let me sleep on both of
my ears :)The whole point of garbage collection is that you, as a programmer, don't have to worry anymore about freeing memory that is not used by the program anymore. So stop worrying.
Ofcourse the GC will never cleanup any object that's still referenced. If it does, there's a bug in the GC, but that's not very likely.