What is the difference between stack and heap memory in Java?

Point	Stack	Heap
Keeps	Method calls, local variables, references	Objects and arrays
Per	One stack for each thread	One heap shared by all threads
Cleaned	When the method ends	By the garbage collector
Size	Small	Big
Error when full	StackOverflowError	OutOfMemoryError

public class Main {
    static void recurse(int n) {
        recurse(n + 1);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int local = 5;                               // on the stack
        String s = new String("object");            // the object is on the heap, the reference s on the stack

        try {
            recurse(1);
        } catch (StackOverflowError e) {
            System.out.println("Stack is full: StackOverflowError");
        }
        System.out.println(local + " " + s);
    }
}

Size options: -Xss for the stack and -Xmx for the maximum heap. See Java Recursion.

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