Why is free() not allowed in garbage-collected languages?

Posted by sundar on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by sundar
Published on 2010-05-04T14:45:34Z Indexed on 2010/05/04 14:48 UTC
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memory-management

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garbage-collection

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free

I was reading the C# entry on Wikipedia, and came across:

Managed memory cannot be explicitly freed; instead, it is automatically garbage collected.

Why is it that in languages with automatic memory management, manual management isn't even allowed? I can see that in most cases it wouldn't be necessary, but wouldn't it come in handy where you are tight on memory and don't want to rely on the GC being smart?

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