Java came out of the gate with automatic garbage collection, making it a development platform of choice for many programmers. It was commonplace to want to avoid manual memory management in other programming languages. We have looked in-depth at the garbage collection system to include the various approaches, or algorithms, used by the JVM. Java 9 includes some relevant changes to the garbage collection system and was the focus of three Java Enhancement Program (JEP) issues. Those issues are listed here:
- Default garbage collection (JEP 248)
- Depreciated garbage collection combinations (JEP 214)
- Unified garbage collection logging (JEP 271)
We will review each one of these garbage collection concepts and their corresponding Java Enhancement Plan (JEP) issue in the following sections.