Question

Is it possible for garbage collected languages to have direct memory acccess?

For instance, I want to show something like this

void crash(){
  for(int i=0; i<1000000; i++){malloc(42)};
}

will incur no problems in a garbage collected language, but I'm not sure what the way to go about showing that is.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65878649/is-it-possible-for-garbage-collected-languages-to-have-direct-memory-acccess

Answer 1

In short: yes.

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I'll use java as an example. For a long while you could access off-heap memory by using sun.misc.Unsafe though this was frowned upon and accompanied by dire warnings that it would go away at some time.

One easier way is to use DirectByteBuffer which uses off-heap memory.

Java is moving on with new, more endorsed ways of accessing off-heap memory, JEP-370 (https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/370) and JEP-383 (https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/383).