Memory management

There are three ways you can manage memory usage in the source code:

1. Manual Memory Management
2. Reference Counting
3. Garbage collection

• Manual memory management involves calling functions that allocate/free memory to variables
  • Can cause issues if try to free memory that isn’t allocated (may attempt to free memory used by another program)
  • Problems may occur if you forget to free memory after it’s no longer needed (memory leaks can occur)
• Reference counting involves counting the number of times a variable is used to determine understand when a variable is safe to be freed
  • Can’t deal with loops
  • May sometimes cause memory leaks to occur

Garbage Collection

• Garbage collection is a form of memory management generally consists of 3 stages

  1. Mark
  2. Reachability Check
  3. Sweep unreachable memory

• Mark all memory that is allocated by the program

• Check that all the marked memory can be reachable

  • Ensure to check loops and memory is that is referenced indirectly

• Sweep (deallocate) all unreachable memory