Welcome to CLR Week 2010. This year, CLR Week is going to be more philosophical than usual.When you ask somebody what garbage collection is, the answer you get is probably going to be something along the lines of "Garbage collection is when the operating environment automatically reclaims memory that is no longer being used by the program. It does this by tracing memory starting from roots to identify which objects are accessible." This description confuses the mechanism with the goal. It's like saying the job of a firefighter is "driving a red truck and spraying water." That's a description of what a firefighter does, but it misses the point of the job (namely, putting out fires and, more generally, fire safety). Garbage collection is simulating a computer with an infinite amount of memory. The rest is mechanism. And naturally, the mechanism is "reclaiming memory that the program wouldn't notice went missing." It's one giant application of the as-if rule.¹ Now, with this view of the true definition of garbage collection, one result immediately follows:If the amount of RAM available to the runtime is greater than the amount of memory required by a program, then a memory manager which employs the null garbage collector (which never collects anything) is a valid memory manager.
This is true because the memory manager can just allocate more RAM whenever the program needs it, and by assumption, this allocation will always succeed. A computer with more RAM than the memory requirements of a program has effectively infinite RAM, and therefore no simulation is needed. Sure, the statement may be obvious, but it's also useful, because the null garbage collector is both very easy to analyze yet very different from garbage collectors you're more accustomed to seeing. You can therefore use it to produce results like this: A correctly-written program cannot assume that finalizers will ever run at any point prior to program termination.Read more: The old new thing
This is true because the memory manager can just allocate more RAM whenever the program needs it, and by assumption, this allocation will always succeed. A computer with more RAM than the memory requirements of a program has effectively infinite RAM, and therefore no simulation is needed. Sure, the statement may be obvious, but it's also useful, because the null garbage collector is both very easy to analyze yet very different from garbage collectors you're more accustomed to seeing. You can therefore use it to produce results like this: A correctly-written program cannot assume that finalizers will ever run at any point prior to program termination.Read more: The old new thing
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