How exactly do static fields work internally? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Static variables belong to the class not the object so there is only one bar in the memory even if you initialize thousands of instants of Foo.

Answer 2

Im only familiar with C#, and this is my understanding of it:

Then your program starts, it loads all the related assemblies into an AppDomain. When the assambly is loaded, all static constructors are called, including static fields. They will live in the there, and the only way to unload them, is to unload the AppDomain.

Answer 3

Static members and constants are stored on heap. Unlike objects on heap that can get garbage collection, Static members and constants do stay till Appdomain is torn down, Hence once should be carefull in dealing with static fields

Answer 4

This depends on the language to language or the designer of the language. If I talk about Java, static members store in the Method area of the JVM and all the object are linked to them. One more thing that is very important to know is that we can access the static data member without creating the object of the class.It means the allocation of the memory to the static data members doesn't depend on the creation of the object of that class.

Answer 5

By specification static variables are stored in Constant Pool. JVM stores this info in Permanent Generation.

Answer 6

There might be exceptions, but for reference types the new-keyword usually creates an object in an internal data structure called "heap". The heap is managed by the CLR (Common Language Runtime). It makes no difference whether you have a static or instance member or a local variable.

The difference between static members and instance members (the ones without the keyword static) is, that static members exist only once per type (class, struct) and instance members exist once per instance (per object).

It is only the reference which is static or not; this distinction does not apply to the referenced object (unless the object is a value type). A static member, an instance member and a local variable can all reference the same object.