3.9. Memory Management

The programmer generally does not need to consider the memory management aspects of programming in Gamma because Gamma handles all memory management requirements of a task internally through a mechanism known as garbage collection. This greatly simplifies programming and eliminates errors associated with dangling pointers, freeing unallocated memory, and array overruns so common in languages such as C. Nevertheless, Gamma provides some functions for examining and invoking the garbage collector. These may be used to determine run-time memory requirements or to ensure that the garbage is collected at pre-determined times.

For more information on garbage collections and the related functions see gc in the Reference Manual.