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Concept
Garbage collection (computer science)
Summary
In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts to reclaim memory which was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called garbage. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp.
Garbage collection relieves the programmer from doing manual memory management, where the programmer specifies what objects to de-allocate and return to the memory system and when to do so. Other, similar techniques include stack allocation, region inference, and memory ownership, and combinations thereof. Garbage collection may take a significant proportion of a program's total processing time, and affect performance as a result.
Resources other than memory, such as network sockets, database handles, windows, descriptors, and device descriptors, are not typically handled by garbage collection, but rather by other methods (e.g. destructors). Some such methods de-allocate memory also.
Many programming languages require garbage collection, either as part of the language specification (e.g., RPL, Java, C#, D, Go, and most scripting languages) or effectively for practical implementation (e.g., formal languages like lambda calculus). These are said to be garbage-collected languages. Other languages, such as C and C++, were designed for use with manual memory management, but have garbage-collected implementations available. Some languages, like Ada, Modula-3, and C++/CLI, allow both garbage collection and manual memory management to co-exist in the same application by using separate heaps for collected and manually managed objects. Still others, like D, are garbage-collected but allow the user to manually delete objects or even disable garbage collection entirely when speed is required.
Although many languages integrate GC into their compiler and runtime system, post-hoc GC systems also exist, such as Automatic Reference Counting (ARC).
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