Programming Concepts Intermediate

What is Garbage Collection?

An automatic memory management process that identifies and reclaims memory no longer in use by a program.

Garbage collection (GC) frees developers from manual memory management. The GC periodically identifies objects that are no longer reachable from any reference and reclaims their memory. This prevents memory leaks and dangling pointer bugs.

Common algorithms include reference counting (Python, PHP), mark-and-sweep (JavaScript), and generational collection (Java, .NET). GC introduces some overhead and occasional pauses. Languages like C/C++ and Rust use manual or ownership-based memory management instead.

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