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.
While developing reasonably complex applications (e.g. accessing external resources such as files, database, network connections) on Android platform is it necessary to handle the Garbage Collection? Or should I let Android take care of GC all the time?
So does Garbage Collector relives an Android programmer from all burden of freeing memory?
If not, then can anybody explain with a practical example why is it so?
In general, GC helps programmers avoid many problems, but it is not a cure-all. As a programmer using a GC’ed system, you have two main things to worry about in terms of the allocation lifecycle:
Dropping references (e.g. setting variables to null) when objects are no longer needed. Failing to do so could result in a memory leak.
Explicitly managing non-memory resources, such as open files. The objects representing these things typically arrange to free up the resources when the objects get GC’ed, but as the programmer you may have a better idea about when the resource is truly unneeded. So, it is in your best interest to (say) explicitly call close() on an InputStream instead of just letting the GC clean it up long after it’s no longer needed.