Abstract

This paper first introdues the main approaches to garbage collection(GC) in modern high-level programming languages, and then focuses on how the 'new' language Java addrsses GC. The object oriented nature of Java and the fact that it is designed to be used in networked/distributed systems poses additional GC related problems. Issues raised by these problems are discussed and suggestions made about ways in which the full advantages of GC in Java can be realised. The main conclusion is that while automatic GC in Jaca makes the writing of code easier, there is still the need for programmer awareness of Java memory management.