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Andrew Uzoka
1,949 PointsGarbage Collection
What is the main purpose of garbage collection and when you are using the keyword pop or del to remove at element from a list for instance is this then available for garbage collection, and how does it work
2 Answers
Broderick Lemke
13,483 PointsGarbage collection is a process that is standard through higher level languages like python. There is a garbage collector that comes through in the background and clears up memory. Whenever we declare a variable, add an item to a list, or declare a function we are taking up space in memory. When we us del() or pop() we are removing items from memory and the garbage collector can come along and free up those spaces in memory. One of the great things about high level languages is that we don't have to worry too much about garbage collection because the language takes care of it on its own. We simply need to be aware that there is a background process cleaning up memory and if we are experiencing issues with huge amounts of memory being taken up by an application, like through a memory leak, that we may need to clear out some variables.
Andrew Uzoka
1,949 PointsThanks. could you also help me understand the copy method on a loop as I am still experiencing difficulties on it. so if you use a copy method on a loop it remains the same whilst iterating through the list rather than using the original that modifies it.