Explain the garbage collection process?

Monika Khurana

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Garbage collection is one of the essential functions of the CLR. You can discuss how it helps in memory optimisation and increasing the efficiency of developers.

For Example: The CLR has the garbage collector, which automatically allocates and releases memory for an application. When the CLR initialises the garbage collector, it allocates memory for the objects. This memory segment is known as managed heap. The managed heap is organised into three generations, namely 0, 1 and 2. Generation 0 is meant for short-lived objects. The garbage collector releases the code objects in this heap more often than in Generations 1 and 2. The garbage collector first identifies the live objects. Then, it updates the references for compacting those objects. Finally, it releases the space used by the dead code objects and transports the remaining code to an older segment.

The garbage collector (GC) manages the allocation and release of memory. The garbage collector serves as an automatic memory manager.

You do not need to know how to allocate and release memory or manage the lifetime of the objects that use that memory.

An allocation is made any time you declare an object with a “new” keyword or a value type is boxed. Allocations are typically very fast.

When there isn’t enough memory to allocate an object, the GC must collect and dispose of garbage memory to make memory available for new allocations.

This process is known as garbage collection.

Garbage Collection in C# has the following advantages −

You don’t need to free memory manually while developing your application.

It also allocates objects on the managed heap efficiently.

When objects are no longer used then it will reclaim those objects by clearing their memory, and keeps the memory available for future allocations.

Managed objects automatically get clean content to start with, so their constructors do not have to initialize every data field.

Reference : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/garbage-collection/fundamentals

Example : https://www.codingame.com/playgrounds/6179/garbage-collection-and-c

Pranam Bhat