What happens to the stack when exiting a method?

Question

I was reading What and where are the stack and heap?. One thing I am a bit fuzzy on is what happens to the stack after a method exits. Take this image for example:

Answer 1

Keep in mind the stack is a zone in memory assigned to a process.

In summary, when in your code you call a function (tipically in assembly language), you need to store in memory the registers you're going to use (it could vary if you're following another contract) because these registers could be overwriten by calls to another function (you'd need to the store return address, arguments, and a lot more, but let's omite that). To do that you decrease the stack pointer by that number of registers. Before to exit, you need to make sure you increase the stack pointer by that same number. You don't need to do anything more because the values you were storing are not needed anymore, they will be overwrited by the next function call.

In Java, references to objects are in the stack when the object itself is in the heap. If all the references to an object are removed from the stack, the garbage collector will remove the object from heap.

I hope my answer helps you. Also, check this.