Tracing vs. reference counting
You may have heard of reference counting being used (for example, cPython uses a reference counting scheme for most of it’s garbage collection work). I am not going to talk much about it because it is not relevant to JVM:s, except to say two things:
The JVM instead uses what is known as a tracing garbage collector. It is called tracing because, at least at an abstract level, the process of identifying garbage involves taking the root set (things like your local variables on your stack or global variables) and tracing a path from those objects to all objects that are directly or indirectly reachable from said root set. Once all reachable (live) objects have been identified, the objects eligible for being freed by the garbage collector have been identified by a proces of elimination.
You may have heard of reference counting being used (for example, cPython uses a reference counting scheme for most of it’s garbage collection work). I am not going to talk much about it because it is not relevant to JVM:s, except to say two things:
- One property that reference counting garbage collection has is that an object will be known to be unreachable immediately at the point where the last reference is removed.
- Reference counting will not detect as unreachable cyclic data structures, and has some other problems that cause it to not be the end-all be-all garbage collection choice.
The JVM instead uses what is known as a tracing garbage collector. It is called tracing because, at least at an abstract level, the process of identifying garbage involves taking the root set (things like your local variables on your stack or global variables) and tracing a path from those objects to all objects that are directly or indirectly reachable from said root set. Once all reachable (live) objects have been identified, the objects eligible for being freed by the garbage collector have been identified by a proces of elimination.
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