A
garbage collector is a
person who picks up your
garbage from out side your door, usually a person employed by the city to do so. In less savory
neighborhoods, this may be the
person next door.
or
In
computer science, a
process, or a
thread, or even an OS feature that cleans up
memory usuage after a process finishes running. This makes sure that if a process explodes, and runs rampant on your machine,
malloc() -ing memory, and never
free()-ing it, that your machine will still have resources left over.
Java has automatic garbage collection, as well as
Microsoft .NET upcoming
platform. It is a huge advantage to not have to worry about your programming, although i think it will
usher in an era of sloppier
code (quite the opposite of what java is intending to do).
Abstraction can be bad in a high amount,
IMO.
(a rescued
nodeshell!)