Re: the advantages of garbage collection

A good GC can improve the performance of code simply

by moving in-use memory around.

Aaron Bartell wrote:

Could you expound on this point? Does it make it more efficient by making
memory contiguous similar to how a HD defrag works?

That is one thing that I think the .NET runtime will do to manage memory for you, though I'd argue that this goes beyond the scope of GC (garbage collection). I think this is part of what is meant when people speak of "managed code". As I understand it, this is one of the technical advantages of the MS .NET runtime over any of the JVMs (that I know of). I'm not sure how other .NET runtimes, for example the Mono project, work in this regard. (Note that I'm not advocating .NET over Java, this is only one point of comparison)

We had a MS guy present about this to our computer science club when I was in university and, in theory anyway, it was very impressive. Walden went in to more detail in another post about some of the considerations that the .NET runtime takes in to consideration when managing memory. As I understand it, these optimizations are not only considered at allocation time, but memory may be reallocated as the program runs.

Does anyone know if it be possible for an operating system's memory manager to do the same sorts of optimizations?