Garbage Collection

Garbage Collection

When you initialize a variable using the new operator, you are in fact reserving some space in the heap memory. The memory is "allocated" for the variable. When that variable is no longer needed, such as when your program closes, it (the variable) must be removed from memory and the space it was using can be made available to other variables or other programs. This is referred to as garbage collection. In the past, namely in C/C++, this was a concern for programmers because they usually had to remember to manually delete such a variable (a pointer) and free its memory.

The .NET Framework solves the problem of garbage collection by "cleaning" the memory after you. This is done automatically when necessary so that the programmer doesn't need to worry about this issue.