What consequences can occur if resources are not released in an application after use?

If resources are not released after use, it can lead to several negative consequences:

• Memory leaks: resources such as memory, files, database connections remain occupied, which over time can lead to exhaustion of available memory.
• Performance degradation: accumulation of unreleased resources slows down the application and system.
• Errors and crashes: for example, if a file descriptor is not closed, attempts to open a file may fail with an error.
• System instability: in the long run, this can lead to application or even operating system crashes.

In Java, automatic resource release is often handled using the try-with-resources statement, which guarantees the closing of resources implementing the AutoCloseable interface:

try (BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("file.txt"))) {
    String line = reader.readLine();
    System.out.println(line);
} catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}
// The resource reader will be automatically closed here