How/when is a Handler garbage collected?

Question

Inside a class of mine I have the following code:

mHandler = createHandler();

private Handler createHandler() {
    return new Handler() {
        public void h         


        

Answer 1

No, stop sending message doesn't make GC work. As the doc points out, it bounds to the thread which creating it. If thread is running, the handler won't be recycled by GC.

Why do you think this could cause memory leaking? What do you mean by "implicit reference to the enclosing Object"?