Recycle

Recycling of objects is a somewhat more complex strategy for reducing the overhead associated with garbage collection. Instead leaving an unused object around for the garbage collector to find, it is put into a container of unused objects. When a new object is needed, the container is searched first to see if an unused one already exists. Because a container always refers to the objects it contains, those objects are never garbage collected.

The recycling strategy can indeed reduce garbage collection overhead. However, it puts the burden back on the programmer to explicitly put unused objects into the container (avoid memory leaks) and to make sure objects put into the container are really unused (avoid dangling references). Because the recycling strategy undermines some of the benefits of garbage collection, it should be used with great care.

Copyright © 1998 by Bruno R. Preiss, P.Eng. All rights reserved.