Essentials of Garbage Collectors

Essentials of Garbage Collectors

Memory leaks and dangling pointers are the main issues of the manual memory management. You delete a parent node in a linked list, forgetting to delete all its children first and your memory is leaking. You delete an object chain in correct order but suddenly your program crashes since you forgot about second owner of this resource, which now tries to dereference a null–pointer.

To avoid these issues, most of the modern high–level programming languages implement automatic memory management. You allocate objects manually, however don t bother with their deallocation: a special program, garbage collector, knows how to automatically deallocate them correctly, and reclaim for future reuse.

In the Essentials of Garbage Collectors class we study all different techniques and algorithms related to the automatic memory management, which are used today on practice.

Who this class is for?

First of all, for compiler engineers.

In implementing your programming language, there is a very high chance you ll need to implement a garbage collector. Even languages which initially were positioned as memory–safe , such as Rust, eventual implemented automatic reference counting (ARC) and other collectors.

To reiterate: in most of the modern high–level programming languages, a garbage collector module (or multiple GC modules, like in Java) is pretty much a requirement today.