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Garbage Collection
Data which is no longer needed should be returned to the system so the space may be reused.

• Manual garbage collection
  • Explicit allocation and deallocation,
  • Used by C and the Daylight toolkit,
  • About 20% of a the Daylight API calls are to dt_dealloc!
  • Hard to ensure no memory leaks (Purify)
• Automatic garbage collection
  • Mark and sweep
    • Used by Java, Eiffel, Smalltalk
    • Doesn't work well with uncooperative C libraries
  • Reference counting
    • Used by Python and Perl
    • Can get memory leaks with cyclic data structures