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What are circular references? Explain how garbage collection deals with circular references. A circular reference is a run-around wherein the 2 or more resources are interdependent on each other rendering the entire chain of references to be unusable.
There are quite a few ways of handling the problem of detecting and collecting cyclic references.
1. A system may explicitly forbid reference cycles.
2. Systems at times ignore cycles when they have short lives and a small amount of cyclic garbage. In this case a methodology of avoiding cyclic data structures is applied at the expense of efficiency.
3. Another solution is to periodically use a tracing garbage collector cycles.
Other types of methods to deal with cyclic references are:
- Weighted reference counting
- Indirect reference counting
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