🚀 go-pugleaf

Can't GC!!! Help!!!!

I have couple hundred panels and underlying models in a GUI application.

When I no longer need a model (an internal structure of objects), I try to
set all the reference paths to it to null.

To do this, I set my own references to the structure to null, and I also set
my own references to the panels that hold references to my objects. So I
expect that the panels and the model objects will get gc'ed.
The problem is that Swing is holding some references through some of it's
static variables.

As a result, none of my objects get garbage collected because internally
everything references everything. Only if I can cut off all the external
references, all of the structure will become ready for GC; in some cases, I
was able to do that. However, I don't know how to make swing not hold static
references to my objects. Those are created after some extensive user
interaction.

Does anyone have similar problem? Is there any trick here I can use?

Only solution I can think of is to go through all my panels and set their
GUI's to some other state, but even that won't guarantee freeing my objects
because I cannot imitate some complicated user interaction that might have
taken place that caused created those Swing references.

Thanks
Ali.