Whats the advantage of garbage collection?
Garbage collection frees you from having to keep track of which part of your program is responsible for the deallocation of which memory. This freedom from tedious and error-prone bookkeeping allows you to concentrate on the problem you are trying to solve, without introducing additional problems of implementation. This is particularly important in large-scale or highly modular programs, especially libraries, because the problems of manual memory management often dominate interface complexity. Additionally, garbage collection can reduce the amount of memory used because the interface problems of manual memory management are often solved by creating extra copies of data. In terms of performance, garbage collection is often faster than manual memory management. It can also improve performance indirectly, by increasing locality of reference and hence reducing the size of the working set, and decreasing paging. Related terms: garbage collection Relevant publications: • Benjamin Zorn. 1993.
