I’ve been working on Garbage Collectors recently, and I`ll share some of my experiences with them with you on my blog.
First off, what is a Garbage Collector?
A Garbage Collector, a.k.a GC is an algorithm that keeps track of your objects in the memory and gets rid of objects that aren’t used (referenced to) anymore, a.k.a garbage collecting. This can only be accomplished when the GC knows all pointers to the objects managed (objects on the managed part of the heap). And they are therefore almost always used with an interpreted/jit-ted language, like Java, Python or C#.
Since the first GC’s (reference counters) they have gained a lot more responsibility and perform a lot more tasks, where collecting the garbage is just one of the things they do.
I`ll discuss the various kinds and aspects of Garbage Collectors with their advantages and disadvantages in coming blog posts.
You can read all articles about the gc in its category.