Gc
    n 1: 1,000,000,000 periods per second [syn: gigahertz, GHz,
         gigacycle per second, gigacycle, Gc]

	

	GC
       Global Catalog (MS, AD)

	

	GC
 /G?C/

    [from LISP terminology; Garbage Collect]

    1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. ?I think I'll GC the top
    of my desk today.?

    2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use.

    3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process.

    Garbage collection is computer-science techspeak for a particular class of
    strategies for dynamically but transparently reallocating computer memory
    (i.e., without requiring explicit allocation and deallocation by
    higher-level software). One such strategy involves periodically scanning
    all the data in memory and determining what is no longer accessible;
    useless data items are then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be
    recycled and used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP language
    usually use garbage collection.

    In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the abbrev GC is more
    frequently used because it is shorter. Note that there is an ambiguity in
    usage that has to be resolved by context: ?I'm going to garbage-collect my
    desk? usually means to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to
    throw away or recycle the desk itself.

	

	GC

   1. garbage collection.

   2. A storage allocator with garbage collection by
   Hans-J. Boehm and Alan J. Demers.  Gc is a plug-in replacement
   for C's malloc.  Since the collector does not require
   pointers to be tagged, it does not attempt to ensure that
   all inaccessible storage is reclaimed.

   Version 3.4 has been ported to Sun-3, Sun-4, Vax/BSD,
   Ultrix, Intel 80386/Unix, SGI, Alpha/OSF/1,
   Sequent (single threaded), Encore (single threaded),
   RS/600, HP-UX, Sony News, A/UX, Amiga, NeXT.

   (ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/russell/gc3.4.tar.Z).

   (2000-04-19)