Automatic memory management and garbage collection

These problems were undesirable, and so newer languages added automatic memory management. A variable that refers to memory that has been freed is called a dangling pointer. This can cause your program to crash if it tries to access a value in memory that doesn’t exist, or it can corrupt your data. The second type of problem consists of freeing your memory while it’s still in use. For long-running applications, this can cause serious problems. This can lead to your program using too much memory over time. If you don’t free your memory when you’re done using it, it can result in memory leaks. After you were done with your variable, you then needed to deallocate it to “free” that memory for other users. This meant before creating a list or an object, you first needed to allocate the memory for your variable. In early programming languages, most developers were responsible for all memory management in their programs. When a variable is used in a program, the process will read the value from memory and operate on it. In many programming languages, a variable in your program code is simply a pointer to the address of the object in memory. The values of your program’s objects are stored in memory for quick access. They also include more complex data structures like lists, hashes, or classes. Objects include simple variables, like strings, integers, or booleans. Memory managementĪ programming language uses objects in its programs to perform operations. If Python is your first programming language, the whole idea of garbage collection might be foreign to you. What is Python garbage collection and why do we need It?

Linux process monitor made in python