Question

I don’t understand garbage collection so good, then I want to know, why it’s so important to a language and to the developer?

Answer 1

Garbage Collection is a part of many modern languages that attempts to abstract the disposal and reallocation of memory with less direction intervention by the developer.

When you hear talk of “safe” objects, this usually refers to something whose memory can be automatically reallocated by the Garbage Collector after an object falls out of scope, or is explicitly disposed.

While you can write the same program without a garbage collector to help manage memory usage, abstracting this away lets the developer think about more high level things and deliver value to the end user more quickly and efficiently without having to necessarily concentrate as much on lower level portions of the program.

In essence the developer can say

Give me a new object

..and some time later when the object is no longer being used (falls out of scope) the developer does not have to remember to say

throw this object away

Developers are lazy (a good virtue) and sometimes forget things. When working with GC properly, it’s okay to forget to take out the trash, the GC won’t let it pile up and start to smell.