Object lifetime

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In object-oriented programming (OOP), the object lifetime (or life cycle) of an object is the time between an object's creation and its destruction. Rules for object lifetime vary significantly between languages, in some cases between implementations of a given language, and lifetime of a particular object may vary from one run of the program to another.

In some cases, object lifetime coincides with variable lifetime of a variable with that object as value (both for static variables and automatic variables), but in general, object lifetime is not tied to the lifetime of any one variable. In many cases – and by default in many object-oriented languages, particularly those that use garbage collection (GC) – objects are allocated on the heap, and object lifetime is not determined by the lifetime of a given variable: the value of a variable holding an object actually corresponds to a reference to the object, not the object itself, and destruction of the variable just destroys the reference, not the underlying object.