Principles
The basic principles of garbage collection are:
- Find data objects in a program that cannot be accessed in the future
- Reclaim the resources used by those objects
Many computer languages require garbage collection, either as part of the language specification (e.g., Java, C#, 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 were designed for use with manual memory management, but have garbage collected implementations available (e.g., C, C++). 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; others, like D, are garbage collected but allow the user to manually delete objects and also entirely disable garbage collection when speed is required. While integrating garbage collection into the language's compiler and runtime system enables a much wider choice of methods, post hoc GC systems exist, including some that do not require recompilation. (Post-hoc GC is sometimes distinguished as litter collection.) The garbage collector will almost always be closely integrated with the memory allocator.
Read more about this topic: Garbage Collection (computer Science)
Famous quotes containing the word principles:
“The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)
“Struggle is the father of all things.... It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
“To abandon oneself to principles is really to die—and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)