The effectiveness of Boehm's GC
Many people still seem to be trying to use Boehm's garbage collector . This is surprising because that GC is conservative , meaning it is incapable of accurately distinguishing between integers and pointers and, consequently, it is prone to memory leaks due to false positives where integers are assumed to be pointers into an allocated heap block, preventing the block from being reclaimed. Consequently, Boehm's GC is a notorious source of memory leaks. Moreover, 32-bit machines with 4Gb of RAM and programs that use a significant proportion of that RAM are still very common and the proportion of the address space in use is, therefore, high so the probability of false positives is very high. Imagine a 32-bit program using 40Mb of heap contains a random integer. The probability of that random integer coincidentally pointing into an allocated heap block is approximately 1% because 1% of the 4Gb address space is covered by heap blocks. Now imagine a 32-bit program containing n rando...