At what stage of development should automatic memory management (Garbage Collector) be implemented?

The automatic memory management mechanism (Garbage Collector) is built into the Java runtime environment and operates continuously during program execution. Therefore, it is not necessary to implement it specifically at any development stage — it is present from the start and automatically frees unused objects.

However, during development, it is important to consider the features of GC operation, such as writing code to minimize the creation of temporary objects and avoid memory leaks. Optimization of interaction with GC is usually carried out during profiling and performance tuning, when the application is already running and bottlenecks are identified.