Xamarin garbage collector and circular links

Question

When reading Xamarin docs in the Performance section, I noticed the following chapter:

The following diagram illustrates a problem that might occur with strong links:

Object A has a strong reference to object B, and Object B has a strong reference to object A. Such objects are called immortal objects due to the presence of circular strong links. This parent-child relationship is not unusual, and as a result, no objects can be recovered by the garbage collector, even if the objects are no longer used by the application.

This is the first time I've heard of "immortal objects" in the context of C # /. NET / Mono.

The page then continues to suggest using WeakReference in one of the objects, which will remove the strong circular link and fix this problem.

At the same time, Xamarin docs on garbage collection claims that:

Xamarin.Android uses the Mono Simple Generational garbage collector . It is a garbage collector marking and marking [...]

Are GC tags and scans marked without circular links?

Answer 1

Memory leaks due to circular references only apply to Xamarin.iOS, which use reference counting for their own objects.

The immortal objects page also says :

Boehm is a non-generational conservative waste collector. This is the default garbage collector used for Xamarin.iOS applications that use the classic API.

The second quote specifically refers to Xamarin.Android.