Garbage Collection and C++

C/C++ had the potential for automatic garbage collection in the form of the conservative mark-sweep Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector for decades (at least from 1988 onwards). Although an early version of the garbage collector is even included in the GCC distribution, only a few groups actively use it. Some have used it as a leak detector. Boehm himself explains this as due to lack of standardization. With C++11, the hope is that this will change with official sanctioning of garbage collected implementations. The slide presentation you can find in the above link summarizes the design. The argument for garbage collection in C++ is the move to multicore, where the claim is that GC parallelizes better than manual management and that some parallelization techniques are simplified in the presence of GC.