Know more about Garbage Collection
Garbage collection (GC) is always considered one of the advantages of using any modern programming language which runs on a rich environment such as (Java, C#, Smalltalk ... etc), most of these languages makes a heavy use of Heap Memory which requires a good cleanup techniques and it can't rely on the programmers to do so, in the old days of C/C++ and before, programmers prove that they can't clean up their memory very well, actually more than 50% of the bugs at that time were caused by the fact the somebody is using a non initialized memory space or leaking memory.
So Garbage Collectors were the solution, and the solution was indeed not very straight forward, lots of trade offs an compromise decisions had to be taken in order to do so.
For more information about the Garbage Collection read these two great articles by Jeffrey Richter on MSDN magazine which are discussing the different design alternatives and decisions and show in details how it is handled in .net framework runtime.
- Garbage Collection: Automatic Memory Management in the Microsoft .NET Framework Part 1
- Garbage Collection: Automatic Memory Management in the Microsoft .NET Framework Part 2