Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management by Rafael D Lins, Richard Jones

Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management Rafael D Lins, Richard Jones ebook
ISBN: 0471941484, 9780471941484
Format: pdf
Page: 203
Publisher: Wiley

If memory is freed automatically, the programmer loses at least some control over programs' resource usage. (Similarly, malloc is not perfect either and has its issues, with multiple implementations available with different characteristics. This brings me to one of the more controversial features of high level languages: garbage collection. Something that is worth looking into is smart pointers (there C++ uses RAII ( Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) programming idiom, there is nothing like automatic memory management known as Garbage Collector in java or AutoZone in Objective-C 2. IMO this is almost a no-brainer. As I discussed in my last post on Memory Allocation dynamic memory is hard to manage One of the duty of a GC system is to automate this process by tracking down (using various algorithms) such objects and reclaim the memory used by them automatically. Further, the selection of garbage collectors practically available to most people is additionally limited to a subset of garbage collection algorithms that are in fact implemented. A less than perfectly C++ smart pointers offer the possibility of a similar level of dynamic-memory safety as garbage collection, but with a different set of performance tradeoffs. You either have to explicitly delete the objects (if in dynamic storage) or they will be deleted automagically (but not by the garbage collector) if in automatic storage. It is merely a tool that can assist in debugging it. Garbage Collection does exactly what it's more fancier name “Automatic dynamic memory management” suggests. It's been helpful for me in revealing errors in deallocating memory in the wrong place when dealing with class inheritance and dynamic binding, for instance. Their very existence tells me . Garbage collection in Java is the processes of freeing the dynamic memory used by objects that are no longer being used by an application. The problem with garbage collection is that it solves only a subset of the overall problem set of dynamic resource management. Unlike other languages, however, C++ does not support automatic memory management or any kind of garbage collection. There are several methods to deal with the lack of automated resource management, is not a fail-safe method for memory management.