title: Why is the user program called mutator in the context of garbage collection?
body: <p>Many <a href="https://www.iecc.com/gclist/GC-algorithms.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">websites</a> mentioned the fact that the user program is called mutator in the context of garbage collection. I'd like to understand why is it be named like that because the naming might imply some important thing that I don't know yet. I tried to google it but failed to get any helpful info. One of my guesses is, perhaps the user program is changing and changing the content of memory that GC needs to work on, so it's named mutator(though I can't infer any important info from this naming way). Correct me if I'm wrong, thank you.</p>