Re: What Garbage Collectors Do

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 8:16 AM, Randall R Schulz <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thursday 05 June 2008 07:33, Nils Kilden-Pedersen wrote:
> > It's a common misconception that the GC needs to clean garbage. The
> > GC is limited by live objects, not dead. The term "garbage collector"
> > is truly a misnomer with current implementations as it is not garbage
> > that is being collected, but non-garbage, i.e. live objects.
>
> How accurate / complete is this notion? It does not seem entirely
> sensible to me.


It sounds like Nils is talking about the "copying" aspect of the garbage
collector in which it "collects" the live objects, compacts and moves them
to a different piece of memory, and then frees the old memory all at once.

Bob

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