The Boehm collector exists and is mentioned in the article, but is not part of the standard library. Typical memory management practice is to store on the stack as much as possible reclaming memory as it goes out of scope. Larger chunks of memory or those that outlast scope typically uses manual malloc + free and these are often batched to minimize overhead. It is fairly unusual to use a GC in C. This is likely due to multiple reasons: history/culture, language design (C only allows for conservative collectors), less precise control over runtime overhead and pauses, higher memory utilization, etc.