Editing Garbage collection (computer science) (section)

=== Tracing ===
{{Main|Tracing garbage collection}}

[[Tracing garbage collection]] is the most common type of garbage collection, so much so that "garbage collection" often refers to tracing garbage collection, rather than other methods such as [[reference counting]]. The overall strategy consists of determining which objects should be 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. However, there are a large number of algorithms used in implementation, with widely varying complexity and performance characteristics.