Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
A static variable is allocated for the entire duration of a program’s execution, so neither stack
nor heap are convenient for it. Then where is that variable? Shouldn’t there be some place where it is loaded from?
Static fields are initialised when a class is loaded and are discarded when the classloader for that class is unloaded. They can be cleaned up, even duplicated in another class loader.
For applications like those that use OSGi, static variables don’t live for the whole life of the application. They can be reloaded many times.
How this is implement may be JVM dependent, but the Sun/Oracle JVM creates an "object" to hold the static fields for a class. This object is accessible via the Unsafe class which can also be used to examine this "objects" fields.