Object Lifetimes and Garbage Collection
Understanding the life cycle of objects is essential for writing efficient, reliable, and maintainable code. As your applications grow in complexity, you need to have an intricate appreciation for how and when objects are created, used, and ultimately released.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the .NET runtime provides a silent and diligent garbage collector, a cornerstone of memory management activities. It is responsible for identifying and reclaiming memory that is no longer in use. In this chapter, we will take a more in-depth look at the garbage collection process, including the various generations, collection modes, and strategies employed by the runtime to optimize performance.
This chapter explores some of the intricacies of memory management in the .NET runtime, and together, we will explore the following:
- Object allocation and deallocation
- Generations and the garbage collection process
- Best practices for managing...