JVM Garbage Collectors

I really liked the phrase that the author put in his presentation. “Garbage Collector is really hard, and we get it for free”.

This phrase really gets to me because I'm a big pusher of Open-source. And he is right, this kinda stuff is hard and there are people pushing the limits of code in order to make our codes better. And I love that.

The author explained a lot of stuff of how a GC (Garbage Collector) works, and the benefits it brings having one always checking what you don’t need anymore inside your code.

What I found most important is the different techniques and philosophies that implementing a GC involves.

My opinion is that a GC needs to run in the background as a separate thread from the main app, and must not interrupt the functionality, because it would be very user experience-wise deficient and tedious. Therefore my believe is that a GC should be run on a different thread and use a technique with which it will compact as much as possible the info in the heap and at the same time will prevent memory leaks in a way that doesn’t interrupt the user experience.

Of course this is no easy task and maybe in some way ,because I (of course) am no expert in the subject, might be impossible to achieve. But that is the wonder of Open-source. In the section above it was described that the newest GC that the JVM uses at the moment is the Shenandoah, which was invented by de Red Hat Linux organization as a open-source gift to the world.

The fact that the most brilliant minds in the world are all working together in order to further improve the algorithms and processes that everybody else write is wonderful and necessary. This is the philosophy of Open-source and free software, and I love it.