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JEP 421 - Deprecate Finalization for Removal

Finalization is an outdated and brittle resource cleaning mechanism present in the platform since the early days of the Java platform. Its use has been discouraged for quite some time in favor of better alternatives (i.e., ‘try with resources’ and Cleaners). In JDK 18, the finalization behavior doesn’t change but JEP 421 introduces a flag to explicitly disable finalization. It could be used to investigate if a codebase is still using finalization. Moreover, a new JFR jdk.FinalizerStatistics event is also introduced in JDK 18.

Call to Action

We encourage developers to investigate if their codebase still rely on finalization. If so, they should start to think about replacing finalizers with better alternatives, i.e., ‘try with resources’ or Cleaners.

For more details, please read JEP 421 and listen to the Inside Java Podcast episode dedicated to this topic. Questions and proper feedback should be sent to the core-libs-dev mailing list.

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