An automatic memory management technique that reclaims memory occupied by objects a running program no longer uses. Invented by John McCarthy, already a pioneer entity on this atlas, around 1959 as part of the Lisp programming language runtime, and described in his 1960 paper Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I, published in Communications of the ACM. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Disputed
Origin YearThe technique is dated to around 1959, but its own seminal description did not appear in print until McCarthy's 1960 Communications of the ACM paper; the invention year and the publication year are two different dates, both recorded rather than collapsed into one. Core PrincipleMemory a program can no longer reach is identified automatically and reclaimed, so the programmer never issues an explicit free instruction for it. 1 Connections
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In Field
Source Wikipedia: Garbage collection (computer science)
Invented By
Source Wikipedia: Garbage collection (computer science)
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Garbage collection (computer science)
Wikimedia FoundationHistory section
Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp
Lead section
Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp.
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