I’m new to java/garbage collected languages and I still am getting my head around what it means to have an object reference (because I’m told it’s not a pointer?) so I’m pondering this question:
I have a parent/child object structure where the parent will have several lists of several children each…is there any inefficiency or any other reason not to have a pointer in each child back to it’s parent? In my prior language (Delphi) it was a simple pointer so not a problem at all. Are there any considerations with this practice in Java?
As previous answers have stated, generally the GC is pretty good with clearing things up. Your primary concern will be things that persist once you leave an activity, hold onto context. This will cause your Activity to stay in memory because you have a reference to it that is not in it’s parent child tree.
More on this here