Is there a destructor for Java?

Because Java is a garbage collected language you cannot predict when (or even if) an object will be destroyed. Hence there is no direct equivalent of a destructor.

There is an inherited method called finalize, but this is called entirely at the discretion of the garbage collector. So for classes that need to explicitly tidy up, the convention is to define a close method and use finalize only for sanity checking (i.e. if close has not been called do it now and log an error).

There was a question that spawned in-depth discussion of finalize recently, so that should provide more depth if required...

Nope, no destructors here. The reason is that all Java objects are heap allocated and garbage collected. Without explicit deallocation (i.e. C++'s delete operator) there is no sensible way to implement real destructors.

Java does support finalizers, but they are meant to be used only as a safeguard for objects holding a handle to native resources like sockets, file handles, window handles, etc. When the garbage collector collects an object without a finalizer it simply marks the memory region as free and that's it. When the object has a finalizer, it's first copied into a temporary location (remember, we're garbage collecting here), then it's enqueued into a waiting-to-be-finalized queue and then a Finalizer thread polls the queue with very low priority and runs the finalizer.

When the application exits, the JVM stops without waiting for the pending objects to be finalized, so there practically no guarantees that your finalizers will ever run.

Use of finalize() methods should be avoided. They are not a reliable mechanism for resource clean up and it is possible to cause problems in the garbage collector by abusing them.

If you require a deallocation call in your object, say to release resources, use an explicit method call. This convention can be seen in existing APIs (e.g. Closeable, Graphics.dispose(), Widget.dispose()) and is usually called via try/finally.

Resource r = new Resource();
try {
    //work
} finally {
    r.dispose();
}

Attempts to use a disposed object should throw a runtime exception (see IllegalStateException).

EDIT:

I was thinking, if all I did was just to dereference the data and wait for the garbage collector to collect them, wouldn't there be a memory leak if my user repeatedly entered data and pressed the reset button?

Generally, all you need to do is dereference the objects - at least, this is the way it is supposed to work. If you are worried about garbage collection, check out Java SE 6 HotSpot[tm] Virtual Machine Garbage Collection Tuning (or the equivalent document for your JVM version).

I fully agree to other answers, saying not to rely on the execution of finalize.

In addition to try-catch-finally blocks, you may use Runtime#addShutdownHook (introduced in Java 1.3) to perform final cleanups in your program.

That isn't the same as destructors are, but one may implement a shutdown hook having listener objects registered on which cleanup methods (close persistent database connections, remove file locks, and so on) can be invoked - things that would normally be done in destructors. Again - this is not a replacement for destructors but in some cases, you can approach the wanted functionality with this.

The advantage of this is having deconstruction behavior loosely coupled from the rest of your program.

No, java.lang.Object#finalize is the closest you can get.

However, when (and if) it is called, is not guaranteed.
See: java.lang.Runtime#runFinalizersOnExit(boolean)

First, note that since Java is garbage-collected, it is rare to need to do anything about object destruction. Firstly because you don't usually have any managed resources to free, and secondly because you can't predict when or if it will happen, so it's inappropriate for things that you need to occur "as soon as nobody is using my object any more".

You can be notified after an object has been destroyed using java.lang.ref.PhantomReference (actually, saying it has been destroyed may be slightly inaccurate, but if a phantom reference to it is queued then it's no longer recoverable, which usually amounts to the same thing). A common use is:

• Separate out the resource(s) in your class that need to be destructed into another helper object (note that if all you're doing is closing a connection, which is a common case, you don't need to write a new class: the connection to be closed would be the "helper object" in that case).
• When you create your main object, create also a PhantomReference to it. Either have this refer to the new helper object, or set up a map from PhantomReference objects to their corresponding helper objects.
• After the main object is collected, the PhantomReference is queued (or rather it may be queued - like finalizers there is no guarantee it ever will be, for example if the VM exits then it won't wait). Make sure you're processing its queue (either in a special thread or from time to time). Because of the hard reference to the helper object, the helper object has not yet been collected. So do whatever cleanup you like on the helper object, then discard the PhantomReference and the helper will eventually be collected too.

There is also finalize(), which looks like a destructor but doesn't behave like one. It's usually not a good option.

The finalize() function is the destructor.

However, it should not be normally used because it is invoked after the GC and you can't tell when that will happen (if ever).

Moreover, it takes more than one GC to deallocate objects that have finalize().

You should try to clean up in the logical places in your code using the try{...} finally{...} statements!

If it's just memory you are worried about, don't. Just trust the GC it does a decent job. I actually saw something about it being so efficient that it could be better for performance to create heaps of tiny objects than to utilize large arrays in some instances.

Perhaps you can use a try ... finally block to finalize the object in the control flow at which you are using the object. Of course it doesn't happen automatically, but neither does destruction in C++. You often see closing of resources in the finally block.

The closest equivalent to a destructor in Java is the finalize() method. The big difference to a traditional destructor is that you can't be sure when it'll be called, since that's the responsibility of the garbage collector. I'd strongly recommend carefully reading up on this before using it, since your typical RAIA patterns for file handles and so on won't work reliably with finalize().

Many great answers here, but there is some additional information about why you should avoid using finalize().

If the JVM exits due to System.exit() or Runtime.getRuntime().exit(), finalizers will not be run by default. From Javadoc for Runtime.exit():

The virtual machine's shutdown sequence consists of two phases. In the first phase all registered shutdown hooks, if any, are started in some unspecified order and allowed to run concurrently until they finish. In the second phase all uninvoked finalizers are run if finalization-on-exit has been enabled. Once this is done the virtual machine halts.

You can call System.runFinalization() but it only makes "a best effort to complete all outstanding finalizations" – not a guarantee.

There is a System.runFinalizersOnExit() method, but don't use it – it's unsafe, deprecated long ago.

If you got the chance of using a Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) framework such as Weld you can use the Java annotation @Predestroy for doing cleanup jobs etc.

@javax.enterprise.context.ApplicationScoped
public class Foo {

  @javax.annotation.PreDestroy
  public void cleanup() {
    // do your cleanup    
  }
}

Though there have been considerable advancements in Java's GC technology, you still need to be mindful of your references. Numerous cases of seemingly trivial reference patterns that are actually rats nests under the hood come to mind.

From your post it doesn't sound like you're trying to implement a reset method for the purpose of object reuse (true?). Are your objects holding any other type of resources that need to be cleaned up (i.e., streams that must be closed, any pooled or borrowed objects that must be returned)? If the only thing you're worried about is memory dealloc then I would reconsider my object structure and attempt to verify that my objects are self contained structures that will be cleaned up at GC time.

No Java doesn't have any destructors .The main reason behind it in Java is the Garbage Collectors that passively works in the background always and all the objects are made in the heap memory , that is the place where GC works .In c++ there we have to explicitly call the delete function since there is no Garbage collector like thing.

In Java, the garbage collector automatically deletes the unused objects to free up the memory. So it’s sensible Java has no destructors available.

Try calling the onDestroy() method when it comes to android programming. This is the last method that executed just before the Activity/Service class is killed.

Missing form all the answers I just scanned is the safer replacement for finalizers. All of the other answers are correct about using try-with-resources and avoiding finalizers as they are unreliable and are now deprecated...

However they haven't mentioned Cleaners. Cleaners were added in Java 9 to explicitly handle the job of cleanup in a better way than finalizers.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/docs/api/java/lang/ref/Cleaner.html

There is no exactly destructor class in Java, class destroyed in java automatically by garbage collector . but you could do that using below one but it's not exact same thing :

finalize()

There was a question that spawned in-depth discussion of finalize , so that you should get more depth if required...