Gc
from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
GC
/G.C/
[from LISP terminology; Garbage Collect]
1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll GC the
top of my desk today."
2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use.
3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process.
Garbage collection is computer-science techspeak for a particular
class of strategies for dynamically but transparently reallocating
computer memory (i.e., without requiring explicit allocation and
deallocation by higher-level software). One such strategy involves
periodically scanning all the data in memory and determining what is
no longer accessible; useless data items are then discarded so that
the memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another purpose.
Implementations of the LISP language usually use garbage collection.
In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the {abbrev} GC is
more frequently used because it is shorter. Note that there is an
ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved by context: "I'm going to
garbage-collect my desk" usually means to clean out the drawers, but
it could also mean to throw away or recycle the desk itself.
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
GC
1. {garbage collection}.
2. A storage allocator with {garbage collection} by
Hans-J. Boehm and Alan J. Demers. Gc is a plug-in replacement
for {C}'s {malloc}. Since the collector does not require
{pointers} to be tagged, it does not attempt to ensure that
all inaccessible storage is reclaimed.
Version 3.4 has been ported to {Sun-3}, {Sun-4}, {Vax}/{BSD},
{Ultrix}, {Intel 80386}/{Unix}, {SGI}, {Alpha}/{OSF/1},
{Sequent} (single threaded), {Encore} (single threaded),
{RS/600}, {HP-UX}, {Sony News}, {A/UX}, {Amiga}, {NeXT}.
(ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/russell/gc3.4.tar.Z).
(2000-04-19)
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