FREE LESSON · Languages & compilers · 4 OF 4
Garbage Collection and Memory Management
Language mastery: who owns memory? — Lifetime, allocation, garbage collection, and boundaries
Memory management answers when storage may be reused.
Manual management gives explicit control but risks leaks, use-after-free, and double release. Tracing garbage collection discovers objects reachable from roots and reclaims the rest, trading control for runtime work and pauses. Ownership systems encode lifetime constraints statically. Reference counting is prompt but struggles with cycles unless supplemented.
Allocation policy, lifetime model, and latency target must be reasoned about together.
The foreign-function boundary weakens assumptions
Managed code calling native code must agree on layout, ownership, error signalling, threading, and how objects remain alive while native pointers exist. A type-safe caller can still be corrupted by a callee that writes beyond a buffer. Safe wrappers minimize and validate the unsafe surface.
Guarantees do not automatically cross an interface implemented under different rules.