Editing Tracing garbage collection (section)

{{Short description|Form of computer memory management}}
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In [[computer programming]], '''tracing garbage collection''' is a form of [[automatic memory management]] that consists of determining which objects should be deallocated ("garbage collected") by tracing which objects are ''reachable'' by a chain of references from certain "root" objects, and considering the rest as "garbage" and collecting them. Tracing is the most common type of [[garbage collection (computer science)|garbage collection]] – so much so that "garbage collection" often refers to the tracing method, rather than others such as [[reference counting]] – and there are a large number of algorithms used in implementation.