Also, its worth noting that you can not reclaim the memory of an object in Java, C# (http://blogs.msdn.com/clyon/archive/2004/09/21/232445.aspx), or any other garbage collected language. If you could, you would no longer have managed code. What you may be able to do in some languages is say "hey GC, I've got this object, I know its got no references, verify that and free the space now please". You can't do this in Java (or C# so far as I know). This is what I meant when I said destroy.

Why might someone need that level of control? Well in an ideal world you would not, but in reality (at least in Java), GC is highly JVM dependent, and on the JVM I use (and probably most if not all of them) GC makes no guarantee that objects available for collection will actually be collected. The OS X JVM in particular is pretty bad here (again, I'm guessing others are too), when you run out of memory, it doesn't even try to GC. Even if you call System.gc() you might not get any space reclaimed. Its ridiculous, but lots of people actually have a method that is basically "System.reallyGC()" which loops a whole bunch of times on System.gc() calls until it either gives up or reclaims some percentage of memory.