Thanks for taking time to express your thoughts.

I’ll try to make this simple. A system can die “gracefully” or “non-gracefully”. If the weblogic or tomcat die due to OutOfMemoryError, I call it a “crash”. Yes, it’s not JVM’s fault but, it’s still a system crash. If you want, you can perfectly handle the errors and keep going without dying.

If you read through the answers posted in the StackOverFlow link you gave, there are some folks who added similar examples like I did. So, I am not the only one who think this as crashing.

By no means, I am not trying to find a flaw in JVM or undermine it’s robustness. Here is a simple metaphor I could think of for this scenario…

A car can be crashed by a reckless driver running over a building or it can go out of whack and got crashed due to some mechanical/logistical malfunctioning like the recent Toyota’s story.

Hope it clears some confusions.

Let’s take a look at your examples.
1. Modify your first example to create a another thread and notice that JVM doesn’t die but just kills the main thread. This is not considered a JVM crash but application logic issue.

public class JVMCrashTest {

public static boolean done = false;

public static void main(String[] args) {

if (!done) {
new Thread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
try {
Thread.sleep(1000000);
} catch (Exception e) {
//Ignore
}
}
}).start();

done = true;
}

main(args);
}
}

2. It is same for second example.

public class JVMCrashTest {

public static boolean done = false;

public static void main(String[] args) {

if (!done) {
new Thread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
try {
Thread.sleep(1000000);
} catch (Exception e) {
//Ignore
}
}
}).start();

done = true;
}

Integer integers[] = new Integer[Integer.MAX_VALUE];
}
}

3. And it is again same for third example.

import java.util.*;

public class JVMCrashTest {

public static boolean done = false;

public static void main(String[] args) {

if (!done) {
new Thread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
try {
Thread.sleep(1000000);
} catch (Exception e) {
//Ignore
}
}
}).start();

done = true;
}

ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
for (int i = 0; i < Integer.MAX_VALUE; i++) {
list.add(new Object());
}
}
}

However, it seems it is possible to *really* crash the JVM (not just kill the thread executing the code) is mentioned at this post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/65200/how-do-you-crash-a-jvm

So please be considerate to others when they try to correct your inaccurate post and I hope you update the post to rectify this.

JVM is a system running native and non-native code. The point is.. it terminates not able to run some code. That’s all we are trying to accomplish. It really doesn’t matter whether we crash it using native or non-native code

What about performance optimizations in Java, should that be done in native code also in order to be considered “a real optimization”?

To really crash the JVM, you need to dereference a null pointer in C code (called via JNI from the JVM).

I never heard of that before.

Thanks for posting the link.