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We all know that the JRE will destroy any object that can no longer be referenced. But is there a way for an object to explicitly destroy itself? Or is that forbidden to avoid the dangling pointer problem?
Naively, I would like to say this = null, but that is disallowed by the compiler (this is probably not a true variable anyway).
Conversely, is there a way for an object to forcibly keep itself alive, by maintaining private copies of this, or otherwise?
Ignoring the academic aspect, you can’t ensure an object is physically destroyed in Java (or most any other garbage collected language, like C#). This is because destroying objects is expensive (partly because of the memory compression phase), so the point is to run it as few times as possible.
This said however, you can force an object to release its allocated resources using the disposable pattern, where the object in question exposes a public method to release resources, and you can call it at any time (or it gets called automatically in the finalizer). It requires a bit more bookkeeping, but it gets the job done if really needed.