About Automatic Memory Management

In general, there are two methods through which automatic memory management can be achieved in programming languages: garbage collection (GC) and smart pointers.

Smart pointers are special data structures that keep track of the reference count of a dynamically allocated object. In languages like C++, these structures typically use the RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) principle to manage dynamically allocated references. Smart pointers can be shared, counting references and shareable by multiple owners, or unique, where only one owner can hold a reference at a given time.

An alternative to smart pointers is garbage collection. At runtime, a program routine called the garbage collector tracks references, and as long as references are accessible from a reference on the stack, the memory for those references will not be recycled. Otherwise, objects will be destroyed, and memory deallocated. Languages with garbage collection are quite popular, such as C#, Java, and Go.

Both solutions have advantages and disadvantages:

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Smart pointers	Deterministic program runtimes	Can be misused depending on specialization
	Better runtime performance in terms of time/memory consumed	Learning their usage can be more complex depending on use case
	Easier to implement than GC	Problems can still arise if used alongside raw pointers
Garbage collection	Programmers don't need to explicitly manage GC presence	Program runtimes are non-deterministic
	Easier to prevent memory leaks	Making memory leaks is harder but not impossible, especially with forgotten threads
		More challenging to implement compared to smart pointers