GC.collect vs. GC.minimize

[Ali Çehreli]

On 9/23/25 7:33 AM, Brother Bill wrote:
 > Is it the case that GC.collect forces a typical GC cycle, and
 > GC.minimize does a full mark and sweep?

GC.collect is already "full collection" as quoted from here:

   https://dlang.org/library/core/memory/gc.collect.html

GC.minimize is a request to GC to give the underlying unused memory back 
to the OS. To me, it's useful in rare cases where an application does 
lots of allocations early on and then gets into a steady state of low 
memory usage. The program can request the GC before getting to that 
steady state to give the memory back to the OS, which the GC might still 
be holding on in hopes of reusing it in the future.

So, a GC.minimize translation: "I know I will not need memory close to 
what I've used so far; give all your free blocks back to the OS."

Ali