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A garbage collection has the following phases: A marking phase that finds and creates a list of all live objects. A relocating phase that updates the references to the objects that will be compacted. A compacting phase that reclaims the space occupied by the dead objects and compacts the surviving objects.
Show activity on this post. The obvious cases for not using garbage collection are hard realtime, severely limited memory, and wanting to do bit twiddling with pointers.
System. GC. Collect() forces garbage collector to run. This is not recommended but can be used if situations arise.
For the specific question "Will pClass be garbage collected": the event subscription has no effect on the collection of pClass (as the publisher).
For GC in general (in particular, the target): it depends whether MyFunction is static or instance-based.
A delegate (such as an event subscription) to an instance method includes a reference to the instance. So yes, an event subscription will prevent GC. However, as soon as the object publishing the event (pClass above) is eligible for collection, this ceases to be a problem.
Note that this is one-way; i.e. if we have:
publisher.SomeEvent += target.SomeHandler;
then "publisher" will keep "target" alive, but "target" will not keep "publisher" alive.
So no: if pClass is going to be collected anyway, there is no need to unsubscribe the listeners. However, if pClass was long-lived (longer than the instance with MyFunction), then pClass could keep that instance alive, so it would be necessary to unsubscribe if you want the target to be collected.
Static events, however, for this reason, are very dangerous when used with instance-based handlers.
Yes, pClass will be garbage collected. The event subscription does not imply that any reference exists to pClass.
So no, you will not have to detach the handler in order for pClass to be garbage collected.
The moment a piece of memory is no longer referenced it becomes a candidate for garbage collection. When the instance of your class goes out of scope, it is no longer referenced by your program. It is no longer used and therefore can be safely collected.
If you are not sure wether something will get collected ask yourself the following question: does there still exist a reference to it? The event handlers are referenced by the object instance, not the other way around.
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