Garbage collector

A garbage collector deallocates unused allocated memory from time to time. This way, in Haskell memory deallocation can be hidden, making the language (more) declarative.

A simple idea of implementing a garbage collector would be to count the references to an object and delete the object, when the last reference disappears. However in a cyclic data structures like let x = 'a':x in x, the x is referenced by itself, so that it would never get deallocated. Thus garbage collection is a bit more complicated and thus needs more effort and phases, where it is applied. Garbage collection is also a bit difficult to handle with respect to real-time processing.

See also

• Research_papers/Runtime_systems#Garbage_collection Research papers