orangeduck/tgc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1100 stars · 69 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

tgc is a tiny (~500 line) conservative, thread-local mark-and-sweep garbage collector for C, provided as a single header. It automatically frees memory allocated via tgc_alloc and friends once it becomes unreachable, with support for destructors and manual collection.

Use cases

• add garbage collection to a C program
• avoid memory leaks in C without manual free
• learn how a mark and sweep garbage collector works
• manage allocations in an interpreter or scripting engine written in C
• replace malloc with a GC-backed allocator in small C projects

When to choose

• you want automatic memory management in C with minimal integration effort
• you need a small, readable GC you can embed and study
• your allocations stay on one thread and use tgc_alloc consistently

When to avoid

• you need a multi-threaded or precise (non-conservative) collector
• pointers come from malloc'd memory, static data, or interior offsets
• you require guaranteed deterministic freeing or real-time latency
• you need a battle-tested GC for large production systems

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

developer-tools developer-tools programming-languages c cpp cross-platform garbage-collector mark-and-sweep conservative-gc memory-safety single-header memory-management garbage-collection

Member repositories

For agents

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