Printer Friendly
The Free Dictionary
989,987,256 visitors served.
?
Dictionary/
thesaurus
Medical
dictionary
Legal
dictionary
Financial
dictionary
Acronyms
 
Idioms
Encyclopedia
Wikipedia
encyclopedia
?

reference counting

   Also found in: Wikipedia 0.03 sec.
(programming)reference counting - A garbage collection technique where each memory cell contains a count of the number of other cells which point to it. If this count reaches zero the cell is freed and its pointers to other cells are followed to decrement their counts, and so on recursively.

This technique cannot cope with circular data structures. Cells in such structures refer (indirectly) to themselves and so will never have a zero reference count. This means they would never be reclaimed, even when there are no references from outside the structure.

?Page tools
Printer friendly
Cite / link
Email
Feedback
? Mentioned in ? References in periodicals archive
 
Template-based swizzler classes which reduce the need for casting and ease object reference counting issues.
 
Encyclopedia browser? ? Full browser
 
 
Encyclopedia
?

Disclaimer | Privacy policy | Feedback | Copyright © 2008 Farlex, Inc.
All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional. Terms of Use.