English Dictionary: gc | by the DICT Development Group |
3 results for gc | |
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]: | |
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From Jargon File (4.2.0, 31 JAN 2000) [jargon]: | |
GC /G-C/ [from LISP terminology; `Garbage Collect'] 1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll GC the top of my desk today." When said of files, this is equivalent to {GFR}. 2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use. 3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process. `Garbage collection' is computer-science techspeak for a particular class of strategies for dynamically but transparently reallocating computer memory (i.e., without requiring explicit allocation and deallocation by higher-level software). One such strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in memory and determining what is no longer accessible; useless data items are then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP language usually use garbage collection. In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the {abbrev} GC is more frequently used because it is shorter. Note that there is an ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved by context: "I'm going to garbage-collect my desk" usually means to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to throw away or recycle the desk itself. | |
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]: | |
GC 1. {garbage collection}. 2. A storage allocator with {garbage collection} by Hans-J. Boehm and Alan J. Demers. Gc is a plug-in replacement for {C}'s {malloc}. Since the collector does not require {pointers} to be tagged, it does not attempt to ensure that all inaccessible storage is reclaimed. Version 3.4 has been ported to {Sun-3}, {Sun-4}, {Vax}/{BSD}, {Ultrix}, {Intel 80386}/{Unix}, {SGI}, {Alpha}/{OSF/1}, {Sequent} (single threaded), {Encore} (single threaded), {RS/600}, {HP-UX}, {Sony News}, {A/UX}, {Amiga}, {NeXT}. {(ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/russell/gc3.4.tar.Z)}. (2000-04-19) |