Can you explain how the garbage collector works in managed programming languages?

Garbage Collector (GC) in managed programming languages automatically frees memory occupied by objects that are no longer used by the program.

Main principles:

• Reachability tracking of objects: GC determines which objects are accessible from root points (e.g., global variables, call stack). If an object is unreachable, it is considered garbage.
• Memory freeing: Unreachable objects are removed, and the memory they occupy is returned to the system.

In Go, the garbage collector operates on a tracing with reachability counting principle. It runs periodically, pausing the program for a short time (stop-the-world) to determine which objects are alive.

Go uses a concurrent, parallel GC with low latency, which helps minimize performance impact.

Thus, programmers do not need to manually manage memory, reducing errors related to leaks and double freeing.