Many still view Garbage Collection (aka GC) either as a magic wand or a stumbling block. This tutorial will attempt to shed some light on the inner workings of GC and will explain why GCs do some things in certain ways but why they cannot easily do some others.

The tutorial will first give an overview of the main concepts behind the operation of GC, cover the most popular GC techniques, and show their pros and cons. Second, it will debunk some popular myths about GC. Topics will include: "GC is faster than malloc", "the truth about reference counting", "destructors and GC don't get along", "the return of the memory leaks", "GC and free() will never marry", etc. Third, it will go over case studies of which GC algorithms are adopted by different products (like several production Java virtual machines, the .NET system, etc.).

Students will leave with a useful knowledge on how GC works and a better understanding of what are its strengths and limitations. These are skills that the students will be able to apply to their everyday work to take advantage of GC as much as possible and improve the performance and behavior of their applications.