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Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:05:34 -0800
From: perryh@pluto.rain.com
To: bennett@cs.niu.edu
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Cc: nlandys@gmail.com, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, alex@stangl.us
Subject: Re: Objective-C 2.0 on FreeBSD; garbage collection, anyone?
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Scott Bennett <bennett@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> If your program never frees any memory, then there is never
> any garbage to collect.

Last I knew, "garbage collection" refers to tracking down and
reclaiming allocated memory to which no valid references exist.

The particular example given here is sufficiently trivial not
to actually need GC -- it could easily free() before losing
the (only) reference -- but keeping track can become extremely
tricky in complex systems (hence the considerable effort that
has been expended in designing and implementing GC systems).