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Stop-and-copy garbage collection in a Lisp architecture: [1] Memory is divided into working and free memory; new objects are allocated in the former. When it is full (depicted), garbage collection is performed: All data structures still in use are located by pointer tracing and copied into consecutive locations in free memory.
In terms of latency, simple stop-the-world garbage collectors pause program execution for garbage collection, which can happen at arbitrary times and take arbitrarily long, making them unusable for real-time computing, notably embedded systems, and a poor fit for interactive use, or any other situation where low latency is a priority. However ...
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.
Some contexts allow for deterministic destruction, but some do not. Notably, in a garbage-collection environment, objects are destroyed when the garbage collector chooses. The syntax for creation and destruction varies by programming context. In many contexts, including C++, C# and Java, an object is created via special syntax like new typename().
Garbage collection is performed by copying live objects from one semispace (the from-space) to the other (the to-space), which then becomes the new heap. The entire old heap is then discarded in one piece. It is an improvement on the previous stop-and-copy technique. [citation needed] Cheney's algorithm reclaims items as follows:
The overhead in code size required for reference counting is very small (on native x86, typically a single LOCK INC, LOCK DEC or LOCK XADD instruction, which ensures atomicity in any environment), and no separate thread of control is needed for collection as would be needed for a tracing garbage collector.
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Further, collecting garbage destroys objects and thus can cause calls to finalizers, executing potentially arbitrary code at an arbitrary point in the program's execution. Incorrect garbage collection (deallocating memory that is not garbage), primarily due to errors in manual garbage collection (rather than errors in garbage collectors ...