Wiktionary
n. 1 A service, generally run by local government, for transporting household garbage to the appropriate facility. 2 (context programming English) A mechanism which ensures that resources no longer in use are made available for reuse, automatic garbage collection.
WordNet
n. the collection and removal of garbage [syn: garbage pickup, trash collection, trash pickup]
Wikipedia
In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program. Garbage collection was invented by John McCarthy around 1959 to abstract away manual memory management in Lisp.
Garbage collection is often portrayed as the opposite of manual memory management, which requires the programmer to specify which objects to deallocate and return to the memory system. However, many systems use a combination of approaches, including other techniques such as stack allocation and region inference. Like other memory management techniques, garbage collection may take a significant proportion of total processing time in a program and, as a result, can have significant influence on performance.
Resources other than memory, such as network sockets, database handles, user interaction windows, and file and device descriptors, are not typically handled by garbage collection. Methods used to manage such resources, particularly destructors, may suffice to manage memory as well, leaving no need for GC. Some GC systems allow such other resources to be associated with a region of memory that, when collected, causes the other resource to be reclaimed; this is called finalization. Finalization may introduce complications limiting its usability, such as intolerable latency between disuse and reclaim of especially limited resources, or a lack of control over which thread performs the work of reclaiming.
Garbage collection, or waste collection, is part of municipal waste management.
Garbage collection may also refer to:
- Garbage collection (computer science), in automatic memory management
- Garbage collection (SSD), in flash memory
Usage examples of "garbage collection".
Only 13 percent of all Indians have access to public sewage systems and garbage collection.
It did not seem to be in a good position for either garbage collection or fishing, which meant food came from elsewhere.
Every week, same time, I bundle them together for the garbage collection - and I've been checking the back issues.
Why don't you go back to your newspaper office and write a column on garbage collection?
We were about to be crunched, swept up, bagged, and put out for garbage collection.
They had been patient when they took over the garbage collection contract and, later, the common areas landscaping contract.