Hi,
I guess "difficulty in properly triggering GC for non-memory resource exhaustion" is closest to what I just described.
This has long been an issue in the Java client area where native desktop resources or the like need to be managed carefully, but it is not just native window handles but any resource not managed by GC.
So more precisely "non-Java Heap" resource exhaustion as you could allocate 2GB of native heap and the GC would not care at all if it were tied solely to a 32 byte finalizable Java object.
Indeed. For what it's worth, I have a plan to design and implement a mechanism to allow native memory to be safely deallocated without using finalization, but it's proving rather difficult to find a nice way to design the API and make it fit the JMM. I hope to get it done by JDK 10. :-)
Yeah, make it work! If you have some time, don't mind to share updated ideas with Robert Muir and me! Thanks, Uwe (for Apache Lucene MMapDirectory where a few bytes of heap space bind up to terabytes of mmap fulltext index data 😊)