Package: libgc-dev (1:6.8-1)

conservative garbage collector for C (development)

Boehm's GC is a garbage collecting storage allocator that is intended to be used as a plug-in replacement for C's malloc. This package is required to compile and link programs that use libgc1.

Since the collector does not require pointers to be tagged, it does not attempt to ensure that all inaccessible storage is reclaimed. However it has typically been more successful at reclaiming unused memory than most C programs using explicit deallocation. Unlike manually introduced leaks, the amount of unreclaimed memory typically stays bounded.

This version of the collector is thread safe, has C++ support, and uses the defaults for everything else. Particularly, it does not work as a malloc() replacement.