Question

Why Java does not support pointers?

Answer 1

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Most studies agree that pointers are one of the primary features that enable developers to inject bugs into their code. When Java was created, the intention was to create a language that is easy to learn and not prone to the bugs that C++ is prone to. It's not like c/c++ where we have to manage the memory management by destructors. In java automatic Garbage Collector works for memory management. Actually, Java references are pointers so everything in Java is accessed only through pointers.

Some reasons for Java does not support Pointers:

1. Memory access via pointer arithmetic: this is fundamentally unsafe. Java has a robust security model and disallows pointer arithmetic for the same reason. It would be impossible for the Virtual Machine to ensure that code containing pointer arithmetic is safe without expensive runtime checks.

2. Security: By not allowing pointers, Java effectively provides another level of abstraction to the developer. No pointer support make Java more secure because they point to memory location or used for memory management that loses the security as we use them directly.

3. Passing argument by reference: Passing a reference which allows you to change the value of a variable in the caller's scope. Java doesn't have this, but it's a pretty rare use case and can easily be done in other ways. This is in general equivalent to changing a field in an object scope that both the caller and callee can see.

4. Manual memory management: you can use pointers to manually control and allocate blocks of memory . This is useful for some bigger applications like games, device drivers etc. but for general purpose Object Oriented programming it is simply not worth the effort. Java instead provides very good automatic Garbage Collection (GC) which takes care of memory management.