Why does Java not have any destructor like C++? [closed]

You're asserting that "garbage collection is very expensive" - could you back that up with evidence? Garbage collection is certainly not free but modern garbage collectors are very good.

Note that one of the ways in which the GC is able to be efficient is that it knows it's the only thing doing memory allocation and deallocation (for managed objects). Allowing a developer to explicitly free an object could hamper that efficiency. You'd also need to worry about what would happen if a developer tried to "use" a freed object:

Foo f = new Foo(); Foo g = f; free(f); // Or whatever System.out.println(g.toString()); // What should this do? 

Are you proposing that each object should have an extra flag for "has this explicitly been freed" which needs to be checked on every dereference? This feels like a recipe for disaster, to be honest.

You're right though - it does allow Java developers to be lazy in this area. That's a good thing. IDEs allow developers to be lazy, too - as do high-level languages, etc. Laziness around memory allocation allows developers in managed environments to spend their energy worrying about business problems rather than memory management.

Garbage Collection is very expensive.

In fact, for complex applications, the performance of garbage collection is competitive with manual storage management based on malloc / free. There is a classic paper by Benjamin Zorn that clearly demonstrates this. In this paper, Zorn describes how he modified some large heap intensive applications to use a conservative garbage collector instead of malloc and free. Then he benchmarked the original and modified versions of the applications. The result was comparable performance.

This paper was published in Software Practice and Experience in 1993. If you haven't read it, you are not qualified to make pronouncements on the "inefficiency" of garbage collection.

^{Note that this research was done with a 1993-vintage conservative garbage collector. A conservative collector is mark-sweep without any compaction; i.e. non-garbage objects don't move. The latter means that allocation of space for new objects is as slow and complicated as malloc. By contrast, modern garbage collectors (e.g. Java 6/7 ones) are generational copying collectors which are much more efficient. And since copying compacts the remaining non-garbage objects, allocation is much faster. This makes GC even more competitive ... if one could find a way to do the comparison.}

Developer does not have control over GC but he/she can control or create object. Then why not give them ability to destruct the objects?

It depends on what precisely you mean by "destruct".

• In Java, you do have the ability to assign null. In some circumstances this may hasten the destruction of an object.

• In Java, you can use finalizers and Reference types to notice that an object is about to be destroyed ... and so something about it.

• In Java, you can define a close() (or equivalent) method on any object and have it do something appropriate. Then call it explicitly.

• In Java 7, you have the "try with resources" construct for automatically calling close() on the resources on scope exit.

However, you can't cause a Java object to be deleted NOW. The reason this is not allowed is that it would allow a program to create dangling references, which could lead to corruption of the heap and random JVM crashes.

That is NOT the Java way. The philosophy is that writing reliable programs is more important than efficiency. While certain aspects of Java don't follow this (e.g. threading) nobody wants the possibility of random JVM crashes.

The C++ destructor is not a way to destruct objects - it's a set of operation that are to be done when the object is destructed. In Java you have no control on the time when objects are destructed (they may be even never destructed), so putting any important code to be executed at object destruction is strongly discouraged (although possible - finalize method). If you ask not for a destructor but for a way to explicitly destroy given object, you are inviting dangling references into your code. They are not welcome.

This makes Java developer lazy in implementing memory management.

No, it releases them to perform useful work.

And Garbage Collection is very expensive.

Compared to what? Facts? Figures? You're about 20 years out of date with that remark. The take-up of Java alone effectively disproves that contention.

This might improves the performance of application.

Or not. Did you have some facts to adduce?

Then why not give them ability to destruct the objects?

Because it's not required?

Destructors are called when the object is destroyed in C++, not to destroy the object. If you want to guarantee cleanup, make the user call a Destroy method or similar.

If you know you don't some big objects anymore just set the references to them to null. This could maybe speed up the garbage collection of these objects.

The C++ destructor is not a way to destruct objects - it's a set of operation that are to be done when the object is destructed.

I think you are confusing terminology. Here is how I see it:

create object = first allocate memory, then construct via constructor

destroy object = first destruct via destructor, then deallocate memory

How the memory is allocated and deallocated depends. If you use new and delete, the memory management is done by void* operator new(size_t) and void operator delete(void*).

A C++ destructor is useful for freeing any resources owned by the object, not only memory. It may be files, sockets, mutexes, semaphores, or any other resource handles. Using a destructor is a smart way of preventing resource leaks. Wrap the resource handling in a C++ class and make a destructor that frees any allocated resources. I don't see any such method in Java. You have to explicitly free the resource, and this can be tricky if there are many possible exit paths.

No, java does not support destructors. All freeing the memory task is done by GARBAGE COLLECTOR.

Java has it's own memory management feature using garbage collector. When you use finalize() the object becomes available for garbage collection and you don't need to explicitly call for the destructor. C# and Java don't want you to worry about destructor as they have feature of garbage collection.

Java is a bytecode language, it has very strong garbage detection. If you were to allow people to define their own destructors it is likely that they might make some mistakes. By automating the process, Java intends to prevent those mistakes.

You do have the ability to control object destruction in Java. It simply uses a different idiom:

Connection conn = null; try { conn = ... // do stuff } finally { try { conn.close(); } catch (Exception e) { } } 

You could point out at this point that this isn't object destruction and that you could, for example, pass that object to something else and still have a reference to it. You are right on both counts. It is simply as close as Java (and most managed platforms) get.

But no Java does not, as you say, have a destructor mechanism as in C++. Some people mistake finalizers for this. They are not destructors and it is dangerous to use them as such.

Memory management for a programmer is hard. You can easily leak memory, particularly when doing multithreaded programming (also hard). Experience has shown that the cost of GC, while real and sometimes substantial, is well and truly justified in productivity increases and bug incidences in the vast majority of cases, which is why the vast majority of platforms now are "managed" (meaning they use garbage collection).