Garbage Collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management where the runtime environment automatically reclaims memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program. This eliminates the need for manual memory management (like malloc/free in C), preventing certain classes of memory safety bugs like use-after-free or memory leaks.
However, Garbage Collection comes with performance overhead and can cause unpredictable pauses (often called “GC pauses”) as the collector runs.
Comparison with Rust
Rust (Programming Language) achieves Memory Safety without a garbage collector by using its Ownership model and the Borrow Checker. This allows for memory safety at compile time with zero runtime overhead, avoiding the latency spikes associated with GC.
