Can a Non-Interpreted language have a Garbage Collector?

Question

Is it possible for a Non-Interpreted language to have a Garbage collector. Interpreted languages have the Interpretor executing the Program line by line so the Interpretor might just as well provide a runtime with a GC. But is it possible to have a Garbage collector for any other language without building the GC in your code itself ?

Answer 1

Yes.

C++ with a smart pointer implementation will garbage collect as the smart pointer reference counts go to zero.

You have garbage collection. You did not build it yourself.

Answer 2

Garbage collection only requires the pointer variables be marked special way so that the runtime can identify them and use for garbage collection. It has nothing to do with interpretation/compilation, but instead requires special runtime and storing additional data with each variable.

Answer 3

Well, .NET languages (that emit to IL - C#, VB.NET, MC++, etc) aren't interpreted (especially if you use NGEN) - and has full garbage collection.

Likewise, Java.

Answer 4

Yes - http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/

Answer 5

For an actual implementation in a compiled language, in this case C and/or C++, see the Boehm GC at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/

Answer 6

Haskell has garbage collection, whether it's compiled to native code or interpreted.

Answer 7

The new C++0x includes features that make implementation of garbage collection easier. See this interview for example.

Answer 8

Objective-C 2 has garbage collection now, and there are garbage collection libraries available for C++ as well.

I think it's possible as long as there is it the language allows you to inspect objects so you can traverse the object tree.