Comment Re:Persistent myth? (Score 2) 705
FWIW, I've never seen a garbage collector that actually worked 100%. We'd be better off writing good clean code instead of relying on them.
Garbage collectors for languages like C/C++ are conservative because they can't always tell what's a pointer to an object or not, so these will not work 100% of the time. In langauges where that isn't an issue (such as Java, Python, Ruby, whatever), the only time a garbage collector will fail is if it struggles with cyclical structures. Java's garbage collector works 100% of the time: if an object is not reachable, it will be reclaimed. Don't confuse this, however, with not having memory leaks; shitty developers who forget they've stashed a live reference to an object have only themselves to blame when the garbage collector does not rightly collect their object.