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I was really looking at the differences between pass by value and how Java allocates objects and what java does to put objects on the stack.
Is there anyway to access objects allocated on the heap? What mechanisms does java enforce to guarantee that the right method can access the right data off the heap?
It seems like if you were crafty and maybe even manipulate the java bytecode during runtime, that you might be able to manipulate data off the heap when you aren't supposed to?
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In Java, all objects are dynamically allocated on Heap. This is different from C++ where objects can be allocated memory either on Stack or on Heap. In JAVA , when we allocate the object using new(), the object is allocated on Heap, otherwise on Stack if not global or static.
Java runtime uses it to allocate memory to objects and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) classes. When an object is created, it is always created in Heap and has global access. That means all objects can be referenced from anywhere in the application.
Yes, an object can be stored on the stack. If you create an object inside a function without using the “new” operator then this will create and store the object on the stack, and not on the heap.
Java objects reside in an area called the heap. The heap is created when the JVM starts up and may increase or decrease in size while the application runs. When the heap becomes full, garbage is collected. During the garbage collection objects that are no longer used are cleared, thus making space for new objects.
There is no instruction in the JVM instruction set that gives arbitrary access to the heap. Hence, bytecode manipulation will not help you here.
The JVM also has a verifier. It checks the code of every method (as a class is being loaded) to verify that the method does not try to pop more values off the execution stack than what it had pushed onto it. This ensures that a method cannot "see" the objects pointed by its calling method.
Finally, local variables are stored in a per-method array (known as the "local variables array"). Again, the verifier makes sure that every read/write instruction from-/to- that array specifies an index that is less than the size of the array. Note that these JVM instructions can only specify a constant index. They cannot take a computed value and use it as an index.
So to recap, the answer is No.
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All objects in Java are located on the heap. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "access objects from the heap". The only things stored on the stack are the list of functions which called into the current context and their local variables and parameters. All local variables and parameters are either primitive types or references.
If you allocate an object using new (which is the only way to allocate non-primitive types; yes this includes array types), then the object is allocated on the heap, and a reference to that object is stored on either the stack or the heap, depending on if the reference is stored in a local variable/parameter or as a member of another object.
When passed as parameters to functions, all objects are passed by reference - if the function modifies the parameter, the original object is also modified. Identically, one could also say that the object references are passed by value - if you change a parameter to refer to a new object, it will continue to refer to that object for the duration of the function, but the original object which was passed in will still refer to whatever it referred to before. Primitive types are also passed by value.
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