main
method of some class.
The virtual machine terminates all its activity and exits when
one of two things happens:
exit
method of class
Runtime
or class System
, and the exit
operation is permitted by the security manager.
This implies that if an application doesn't start any threads itself,
the JVM will exit as soon as main
terminates.
This is not the case, however, for a simple application
that creates and displays a java.awt.Frame
:
public static void main(String[] args) { Frame frame = new Frame(); frame.setVisible(true); }The reason is that AWT encapsulates asynchronous event dispatch machinery to process events AWT or Swing components can fire. The exact behavior of this machinery is implementation-dependent. In particular, it can start non-daemon helper threads for its internal purposes. In fact, these are the threads that prevent the example above from exiting. The only restrictions imposed on the behavior of this machinery are as follows:
EventQueue.isDispatchThread
returns true
if and only if the calling thread is the
event dispatch thread started by the machinery;
AWTEvents
which were actually enqueued to a
particular EventQueue
(note that events being
posted to the EventQueue
can be coalesced) are
dispatched:
AWTEvent
A is enqueued
to the EventQueue
before
AWTEvent
B then event B will not be
dispatched before event A.Component.isDisplayable
).
exit
method of class Runtime
or class System
regardless of the presence of displayable components;
Starting with 1.4, the behavior has changed as a result of the fix for 4030718. With the current implementation, AWT terminates all its helper threads allowing the application to exit cleanly when the following three conditions are true:
System.exit
must:
Window.dispose
on all top-level Windows
. See
Frame.getFrames
.
EventQueue
.
The argument is that methods
of AWT event listeners are typically executed on helper
threads.
<...> Runnable r = new Runnable() { public void run() { Object o = new Object(); try { synchronized (o) { o.wait(); } } catch (InterruptedException ie) { } } }; Thread t = new Thread(r); t.setDaemon(false); t.start(); <...>The Java™ Virtual Machine Specification guarantees that the JVM doesn't exit until this thread terminates.
Report a bug or suggest an enhancement
For further API reference and developer documentation see the Java SE Documentation, which contains more detailed, developer-targeted descriptions with conceptual overviews, definitions of terms, workarounds, and working code examples.
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DRAFT 11-ea+10