garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management.

The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program.

GC is used to clean up unused objects and so reduce the potential for memory leaks and data corruption.

Types of garbage collection:

• Tracing The overall strategy consists of determining which objects should be garbage collected by tracing which objects are reachable by a chain of references from certain root objects, and considering the rest as garbage and collecting them
• Reference Counting.

Resources other than memory, such as network sockets, database handles, user interaction windows, file and device descriptors, are not typically handled by garbage collection.