What Is Garbage Collection (GC)?

Garbage Collection (GC) is like that friend who has a house full of stuff but still manages to make it look like a Pinterest board. When you're over for dinner, it's the friend who casually mentions that she has no idea where the last three months went because she got so into organizing her closet. She doesn't even remember buying all those clothes! Garbage collection is like that friend who comes over to your house and snaps a picture of your sink with one of those fancy cameras that takes pictures from across the room. They text you later and ask if they can keep it—they want to hang it on their wall. Garbage collection is like the automatic memory allocation of a car's parking brake. It's there to help you out when you forget to engage the parking brake manually, but it doesn't do you any good if you don't use it. Garbage collection is a dynamic approach to automatic heap allocation that addresses common and costly errors that often result in real-world program defects when undetected. In particular, garbage collection offers heap allocation without explicit memory management. While this may seem like a trivial improvement over manual memory management, it has profound implications for programming languages and software development. The most critical importance of garbage collection is that programs are no longer required to explicitly free memory when they're done with it. This makes programming languages more concise and allows them to be used in contexts where explicit memory management would be impractical or impossible (such as embedded systems). Many people believe that garbage collection is an essential programming language feature. After all, it makes heap allocation management more straightforward and less error prone. But is garbage collection so perfect? Garbage collection isn't without its issues. For one thing, GC can cause the program to run more slowly than manual heap allocation management. This is because GC must perform a lot of bookkeeping to track which objects are still in use by the program so that they can be adequately collected when they are no longer needed. Although, this bookkeeping may make it easier for humans to identify and repair allocation errors, it also increases overhead within the program itself and memory usage on the host system. GC also has some limitations when it comes to memory management. For example, if you have a large amount of data that needs to be stored in memory but only have a small amount available at any given time (such as with a database), then the best solution may not be to use GC at all!