Question - Explain garbage collection in VB.NET? State the advantages of garbage collection.
Answer -
The garbage collector in VB.NET regulates memory allocation and release for your application. When you create a new object, the managed heap is used to allocate memory for it via the common language runtime. The runtime continues to allocate space for new objects as long as address space in the managed heap is available. Memory, on the other hand, is finite. In order to liberate some memory, the garbage collector must eventually complete a collection. Based on the allocations being made, the garbage collector's optimising engine calculates the optimal moment to do a collection. When the garbage collector does a collection, it searches the managed heap for objects that are no longer in use by the application and executes the appropriate procedures to free up their memory. The garbage collector (GC) is an automatic memory manager in the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The garbage collector is in charge of managing an application's memory allocation and release. This means that you do not have to create code to handle memory management duties if you are dealing with managed programs. Automatic memory management can solve problems like forgetting to free an item, resulting in a memory leak, or trying to access memory for an object that has already been freed.
A few advantages of garbage collection are as follows:
- It eliminates the need for developers to manually release memory.
- Objects are efficiently allocated on the controlled heap.
- Objects that are no longer in use are reclaimed, their memory is cleared, and the memory is made available for future allocations. Managed objects come with clean content out of the box, so their builders don't have to worry about filling in every data field.
- Provides memory safety by ensuring that an object cannot use memory assigned to another object for its own purposes.