Tag: garbage-collection

Garbage Collection (GC) algorithms

As an iOS developer, I am quite familiar with Reference Counting. It is considered a fundamental knowledge regarding memory manangement that every iOS developers must acknowledge. Today, I figured out a few more algorithms of garbage collection. Fig 1. From left to right: Reference Counting, Mark-Sweep, Mark-Compact, Copying. Reference Counting (RC) This is simple & easy to implement. However, it has some major drawbacks one of which is not being able to deal with retain cycles.