Garbage Collection and Automatic Memory Management: Tracing vs Reference Counting, Tri-Color Marking, Generational Barriers, Concurrent Compaction (ZGC/Green Tea), and Rust Lifetimes

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 29, 2026 · 1h 1m

Every heap-allocated object must eventually be freed: free it one nanosecond too early and you get a Use-After-Free exploit; free it too late and your server runs out of RAM. We explore how modern runtimes solve this—from Dijkstra's Tri-Color Marking, Generational Card Tables, and Bacon's Unified Theory to ZGC Colored Pointers, Go's cache-conscious Green Tea GC, and Rust's compile-time Borrow Checker.

Chapters

00:00:00 Opening: The Impossible Choice Between Use-After-Free and Stop-the-World Pauses

00:03:13 Semantic vs Syntactic Liveness, Roots, and the 1960 Dual Invention: McCarthy's…