Garbage collection in modern web applications
summary
SoundCloud builds a tracing garbage collector on top of React + Redux (TypeScript, Electron/Xbox) that tracks live selector functions, exposes a drop-in gcConnect, and frees memory by running selectors to rebuild state into a fresh normalized store instead of mutating or nulling entities. The system turns many duplicate entities (ten tracks → six tracked entities) into a compact graph, avoids component rerenders because object references stay intact, and proves effective at stopping long‑running memory growth while trading extra selector evaluations.
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