The idea that we have demonstrated with the shared pointers of C++ can be applied to all objects. Many languages such as Perl, Python or PHP take this approach. This is best illustrated with a picture:

The green clouds indicate that the object that they point to is still in use by the programmer. Technically, these may be things like a local variable in the currently executing method or a static variable or something else. It may vary from programming language to programming language so we will not focus on it here.

The blue circles are the live objects in memory, with the numbers inside denoting their reference counts. Finally, the grey circles are objects that are not referenced from any object that is still explicitly in use (these are directly referenced to by the green clouds). The grey objects are thus garbage and could be cleaned by the Garbage Collector.

This all looks really good, does it not? Well, it does, but the whole method has a huge drawback. It is quite easy to end up with a detached cycle of objects none of which are in scope yet due to cyclic references the count of their reference is not zero. Here’s an illustration:

See? The red objects are in fact garbage that the application does not use. But due to the limitations of reference counting there is still a memory leak.

There are some ways to overcome this, such as using special ‘weak’ references or applying a separate algorithm for collecting cycles. The aforementioned languages – Perl, Python and PHP – all handle cycles in one way or another, but this is outside the scope of this handbook. Instead, we will start investigating the approach taken by the JVM in more details.