Why do garbage collectors freeze execution?

Posted by Martin on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Martin
Published on 2009-11-30T17:50:33Z Indexed on 2012/06/19 9:17 UTC
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I was thinking about garbage collection on the way home, and I began wondering, why does the garbage collector totally freeze execution of a program? Personally I would have designed it to block any threads which try to allocate a new object, but threads which were running would be left alone. I can't imagine any situation where this would be a problem compared to how a garbage collector currently works.

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