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by viraptor 2529 days ago
Conservative GC is pretty much: look at all reachable memory, whatever looks like a pointer to a range which is allocated keeps that range allocated.

Pros: you don't have to care about type information and precise stack/structure walking.

Cons: If you have range 0x8000-0x8010 allocated, and have a variable with integer value 0x8001 somewhere in the memory, it will keep that range allocated. It doesn't matter that it's an int, not a pointer. Floats and 32-bit pointers have quite a lot of accidental collisions that way.