Using System.gc

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

So this is just a habit of mine, whenever a game loop is cancel I usually running a destroy() functions that will clear all List, ArrayList, HashMap, HashSet and so on. Before setting them to null.

A typical destroy function I write looks like this


    public static void destroy(){
 
        System.out.println("Clearing chunks and entities.");
        for(World w : worlds){
            w.entityList.clear();
            w.entityList = null;
            
            w.chunks.clear();
            w.chunks = null;
        }
        
        System.out.println("Clearing worlds.");
        worlds.clear();
        worlds = null;
    }

Then when everything is done I usually run one System.gc just before running System.exit. But I have heard that System.gc should be avoided, and I was wondering is it so bad to run it once before exit the game?