A former college professor of mine and I were discussing memory leaks and garbage collection in various scripting languages the other day, and he asked me how this issue was handled in perl ...

You may already have background in this, though for the benefit of those reading on...

There are two principle approaches to memory management. One is to keep reference counts on objects, freeing the object when the count reaches zero. It's more work up front, but memory is freed promptly. One downside is that self-referential structures never reach zero reference counts, and hence are never freed. Perl5 uses this approach.

The second scheme is to periodically sweep through memory, tracing out objects that are reachable through known starting points (e.g., global variables, stack frames), and freeing anything that isn't reachable. There's ongoing overhead, but garbage collection can take noticeable time (though there are many clever optimizations that can make this approach run quickly). Self referential structures that are not otherwise reachable do get freed. Most Java implementations use this approach.

In reply to Re: Circular references and Garbage collection. by dws
in thread Circular references and Garbage collection. by DigitalKitty

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.