User:Trustable/Memory management

This page should explain different techniques of Memory management in programming languages.

Manual memory management

Main article: Manual memory management

E.g. malloc() and free() in C.

Cons:

• No protection of memory leaks
• No protection of use after free bugs

Tracing garbage collection

Main article: Tracing garbage collection

Used by:

• Java
• JavaScript
• Common Language Runtime
• Go
• many more

Cons:

• Runtime costs

Reference counting with tracing garbage collection

Main article: Reference counting

The tracing part is needed for cycle detection.

Used by:

• Python
• PHP
• Nim

Cons:

• Runtime costs

Reference counting with ownership

Main article: Automatic Reference Counting

Used by:

• C++ (unique_ptr)
• Rust
• Swift
• Nim (ORC) (more info)
• V

Cons:

• Runtime costs

External Links

• Ownership You Can Count On: A Hybrid Approach to Safe Explicit Memory Management