The source code for AutoZone, the Objective-C Garbage Collector found in Mac OS X Leopard, is now available. It has been released under the Apache v2 license.

This is the same collector that is found in Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3 (the collector was not updated as a part of 10.5.4 or 10.5.5).

The garbage collector is not limited to Objective-C. It is actually a fairly generic scanning, conservative, generational, multi-threaded, language agnostic, collector. The implementation has certainly been tested and optimized with Mac OS X based applications.

Notably, MacRuby uses AutoZone to offer a common GC implementation across object graphs that span Ruby and Objective-C.

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