There is a whole class of memory leaks that is possible in C but not in Java. You can leak memory by forgetting to deallocate it. This class is not possible in

There is a whole class of memory leaks that is possible in C but not in Java. You can leak memory by forgetting to deallocate it. This class is not possible in typical Java code, because the garbage collector collects it. Then you have memory leaks that happens because the application has data structures that grow unbounded. The latter one is not really preventable by automatic means, because the memory is still referenced from elsewhere in the application, and a garbage collector can't know that this memory won't be accessed again. It does help that the most common source of memory leaks is eliminated however. That many Java applications are memory hogs is more a result of typical Java programming style than anything else.