I've frequently wanted to understand the actual workings of the JVM garbage collector but I get bogged down reading the C/C++. If you want to know exactly how

I've frequently wanted to understand the actual workings of the JVM garbage collector but I get bogged down reading the C/C++. If you want to know exactly how a program works then reading the source is a great way to do it. Someone who is not a GC expert could become at least GC proficient by reading the code that does say the object tree walking. I know that having the language implementation source available has been useful to me in Java. I go to the implementation of BigDecimal or ArrayList to really see how things work. The same can be true of compilers and runtimes. It's much easier if you are not context switching or required to know different languages.