mkirchner/gc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1306 stars · 73 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A small, zero-dependency conservative mark-and-sweep garbage collector for C that replaces malloc/calloc/realloc/free. It is designed to be conceptually clean and readable, making it well suited for learning how garbage collection works.

Use cases

• add garbage collection to a C program
• learn how mark-and-sweep garbage collectors work
• replace malloc and free with a GC-managed allocator
• build a Lisp or scripting language interpreter in C
• study a simple readable GC implementation

When to choose

• you want a tiny, dependency-free GC for a C project
• you are building an interpreter or language runtime in C
• you want readable source code to study GC internals

When to avoid

• you need a production-hardened, architecture-optimized collector (use Boehm GC)
• you need multithreaded or concurrent garbage collection
• you need predictable real-time latency

Facets

library · maturity active

developer-tools programming-languages developer-tools c cross-platform garbage-collection mark-and-sweep conservative-gc memory-allocator zero-dependency learning-resource memory-management algorithms linux macos

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