Difference between revisions of "Garbage collector"
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Revision as of 17:35, 28 December 2008
A garbage collector deallocates unused allocated memory from time to time. This way, in Haskell memory deallocation can be hidden, making the language (more) declarative.
A simple idea of implementing a garbage collector would be to count the references to an object
and delete the object, when the last reference disappears.
However in a cyclic data structures like let x = 'a':x in x,
the x is referenced by itself, so that it would never get deallocated.
Thus garbage collection is a bit more complicated and thus needs more effort and phases, where it is applied.
Garbage collection is also a bit difficult to handle with respect to real-time processing.