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Phantom references

Phantom references are the weakest of the three reference types. There is however a significant difference between Phantom references and the other reference types. Objects that are referenced by phantom references are put on the reference queue before the memory occupied by their referents is reclaimed, while soft and weak references are enqueued after the memory occupied by their referent is reclaimed.

Another important difference in the words of Ethan Nicholas is;

"A phantom reference is quite different than either SoftReference or WeakReference. Its grip on its object is so tenuous that you can't even retrieve the object -- its get() method always returns null. The only use for such a reference is keeping track of when it gets enqueued into a ReferenceQueue, as at that point you know the object to which it pointed is dead. How is that different from WeakReference, though?"


So what good are Phantom References? Well according to the documentation:

Phantom references are most often used for scheduling pre-mortem cleanup actions in a more flexible way than is possible with the Java finalization mechanism.

Now how useful are these? If you have ever used Phantom references, do write about your experience in the comments section.

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Note: This text was originally posted on my earlier blog at http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net
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