Question

Does an OutOfMemoryError cause a spawned thread to die?

As in will it exit from run()?

Answer 1

It depends, whether the Error was thrown within the thread or within another thread. Please observe the behaviour of the following Snippet:

public class Test implements Runnable {

    public void run() {
        while (true) {
            try {
                Thread.sleep(1000);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            }
            System.out.println("alive");
        }
    }



    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Thread(new Test()).start();
        throw new OutOfMemoryError();
    }
}

You can easily see, the spawned thread is still alive, although the main thread will die instantly after the Error is thrown. There is, however, no guarantee at all, which thread will finally throw the error.