为什么 Java 类加载器不释放 jars

Question

I need to load classes from jars, to do it I'm using:

cls = Class.forName(className, false, classLoader);

At the end, I want to delete these jars, but it seems that this is not possible because ClassLoader does not release the jars. So I used:

classLoader.release();

System.gc();

But unfortunately this does not solve the problem...

Answer 1

According to the JLS , classes (and therefore JAR-files) cannot be unloaded explicitly.

It might be possible to achieve something similar with some trickery as described here , but it depends on the actual implementation of the JVM and is therefore nothing you should build on.