Garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory used by objects that will never be accessed or mutated again by the application. Garbage collection was invented by John McCarthy around 1959 to solve the problems of manual memory management in his Lisp programming language.

Garbage collection is often portrayed as the opposite of manual memory management, which requires the programmer to specify which objects to deallocate and return to the memory system. However, many systems use a combination of the two approaches, and there are other techniques being studied (such as region inference) to solve the same fundamental problem

NOTES FROM THE ORGANIZER:

PS: The speaker has already declared some disagreement with the wikipedia description of garbage collection, but this is the best that I [Cesar] could cook in just a few seconds, and - you know - I enjoy being controversial :)

PS2: Considering the topic of the talk, we should leave the room squeaky-clean.

PS3: With a bit of luck we will be enjoying a new whiteboard, courtesy of IMDEA Software.