I think I generally know what the Garbage Collector in Java does, but It's praised a lot, so I thought maybe I'm missing something about it's functionality.
What I know is, that the GC takes care of erasing from the memory objects that have no reference to them, and thus are unreachable by the programmer.
For example, if inside a loop I'm constantly creating a new Object(), the previous ones will eventually get deleted by the GC (correct me if I'm wrong).
This is very useful for me as a Java programmer, and spares me a lot of headache that I assume C++ programmers have to deal with – manually deleting objects from the memory (again, correct me if I'm wrong).
This feature is awesome, but is there anything more to the Garbage Collector? Am I missing something?
Best Answer
No, not missing anything about Garbage Collection.
Garbage collection frees developers from the minutia of allocating and de-allocating memory themselves.
Being part of the platform means there is a whole class of problems that Java does not have (and .NET and other garbage collected runtimes as well).
What you may be missing is just how much trouble having to deal with memory allocations and de-allocations and the bugs inherent with not getting them right really is ;)