Question

If I have a linked list structure, and I implement the clear() method as follows:

public void clear() {
    firstNode = null;
    size = 0;
}

will it still get correctly garbage collected, or would I want to walk through each node, setting nextNode to null?

None of the nodes can be directly referenced from outside the linked list, so there’s no case where there would be a reference to any of them outside my class, but I’m unsure if Java would correctly garbage collect the remaining chained nodes.

Answer 1

That should be fine – Java handles cyclic references etc with no problems.