• A garbage collection technique that identifies and reclaims unused memory by tracing through all reachable objects from a set of root references (such as global variables and stack variables) and marking them as live. After a tracing phase completes, any objects not marked as reachable are considered garbage and their memory can be safely reclaimed. Common tracing GC algorithms include mark-and-sweep, mark-and-compact, and copying collectors.

1. Related terms: Garbage collection · Tracing · Garbage in, garbage out · Ray tracing
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