Javacard - power loss during garbage collection

Question

I noticed some very strange behaviour on my smartcards (NXP J2E145, J3A081, J3C145 with an Omnikey 5121 reader): A power loss right after calling JavaCard method

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Answer 1

I think this may be an implementation bug. In general, garbage collection is never needed nor used on smart cards.

You should avoid Garbage Collection under any circumstances by good applet design. That way you should never run into memory problems. Applets are commonly installed only once in their lifetime and should be usable for the rest of the life-cycle of the card.

Garbage Collection generally takes too long for normal use cases. Maybe that is why the programmer of the Java Card or underlying system libraries didn't expect it to happen outside a secure environment.