Hans Boehm describes the operation of the collector as follows: The collector uses a mark-sweep algorithm. It provides incremental and generational collection under operating systems that provide the right kind of virtual memory support. (Currently this includes Linux, *BSD, recent Windows versions, MacOS X, HP/UX, Solaris, Tru64, Irix, and a few other operating systems, with varying restrictions.) It allows finalization code to be invoked when an object is collected. It can take advantage of type information to locate pointers if such information is provided, but it is usually used without such information. Boehm GC can also run in
leak detection mode in which memory management is still done manually, but the Boehm GC can check if it is done properly. In this way a programmer can find memory leaks and double deallocations. Boehm GC is also distributed with a
C string handling library called cords. This is similar to
ropes in C++ (
trees of constant small arrays), but instead of using reference counting for proper deallocation, it relies on garbage collection to free objects. Cords are good at handling very large texts, modifications to them in the middle, slicing, concatenating, and keeping history of changes (
undo/redo functionality). == Operation ==