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In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage.Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with Lisp.
Other languages, such as C and C++, were designed for use with manual memory management, but have garbage-collected implementations available. 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 ...
In many contexts, including C++, C# and Java, an object is created via special syntax like new typename(). In C++, that provides manual memory management, an object is destroyed via the delete keyword. In C# and Java, with no explicit destruction syntax, the garbage collector destroys unused objects automatically and non-deterministically.
Unreachable memory in systems that use manual memory management results in a memory leak. Some garbage collectors implement weak references . If an object is reachable only through either weak references or chains of references that include a weak reference, then the object is said to be weakly reachable .
Manual memory management (as in C++) and reference counting have a similar issue of arbitrarily long pauses in case of deallocating a large data structure and all its children, though these only occur at fixed times, not depending on garbage collection. Manual heap allocation. search for best/first-fit block of sufficient size; free list ...
Objective-C and Objective-C++ support optional reference counting and garbage collection as alternatives to manual memory management (Apple deprecated the garbage collector). PostScript originally required developers to manually reclaim memory using the save and restore operators. PostScript Level 2 introduced a garbage collector, but its usage ...
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Reference counting is also among the simplest forms of memory management to implement. It also allows for effective management of non-memory resources such as operating system objects, which are often much scarcer than memory (tracing garbage collection systems use finalizers for this, [citation needed] but the delayed reclamation may cause ...