A Brief History Of Garbage Collection
By Brian Goetz
2004-01-22
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A brief history of garbage collection
The benefits of garbage collection are indisputable -- increased reliability, decoupling of memory management from class interface design, and less developer time spent chasing memory management errors. The well-known problems of dangling pointers and memory leaks simply do not occur in Java programs. (Java programs can exhibit a form of memory leak, more accurately called unintentional object retention, but this is a different problem.) However, garbage collection is not without its costs -- among them performance impact, pauses, configuration complexity, and nondeterministic finalization.
An ideal garbage collection implementation would be totally invisible -- there would be no garbage collection pauses, no CPU time would be lost to garbage collection, the garbage collector wouldn't interact negatively with virtual memory or the cache, and the heap wouldn't need to be any larger than the residency (heap occupancy) of the application. Of course, there are no perfect garbage collectors, but garbage collectors have improved significantly over the past ten years.
First published by IBM developerWorks
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