Monday, November 28, 2011

What are circular references? Explain how garbage collection deals with circular references.

A circular reference is a run-around wherein the 2 or more resources are interdependent on each other rendering the entire chain of references to be unusable.

There are quite a few ways of handling the problem of detecting and collecting cyclic references.

1. A system may explicitly forbid reference cycles.
2. Systems at times ignore cycles when they have short lives and a small amount of cyclic garbage. In this case a methodology of avoiding cyclic data structures is applied at the expense of efficiency.
3. Another solution is to periodically use a tracing garbage collector cycles.
Other types of methods to deal with cyclic references are:
•Weighted reference counting
•Indirect reference counting

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