Does the garbage collector free the memory used by the stack during application runtime?

The Garbage Collector in Java manages memory in the heap, where objects are stored. The stack memory, where local variables and method calls are stored, is managed automatically and is freed when exiting a method.

Therefore, the garbage collector does not free stack memory — this happens according to the rules of the call stack during program execution. The garbage collector is only responsible for cleaning up unused objects in the heap.