In
computer science,
manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or
garbage. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of
programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though
garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with
Lisp. Today, however, languages with garbage collection such as
Java are increasingly popular; the main manually managed languages still in widespread use today are
C and
C++ – see
C dynamic memory allocation.