Garbage collector is a piece of software that automatically frees up memory that is no longer being used by the program. It's like having a robot maid that cleans up after you so you don't have to worry about memory management while you're busy hacking away on your latest project.

How to use it in a sentence

• "I don't bother deallocating memory manually anymore. I just let the garbage collector handle it while I focus on more important things, like arguing about tabs vs spaces on Reddit."

• "Our genius intern tried to impress us by writing his own memory management system instead of using the garbage collector. After his app crashed and burned harder than Meta's metaverse, he learned to appreciate the magic of automatic memory management."

If you actually want to learn more...

Here are a few useful articles to dive deeper into garbage collection:

• A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection - This paper presents a comprehensive mathematical model of garbage collection that unifies previous work. A must-read if you want to understand the theoretical underpinnings.

• The Garbage Collection Handbook - An in-depth online book that covers garbage collection algorithms and their implementations in a variety of programming languages. It's like the bible of GC.

• Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management - This study compares the performance of explicit memory management to five state-of-the-art garbage collectors. Useful data to have the next time a C programmer tries to tell you manual malloc/free is faster.

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