iOS Components and Frameworks: Understanding the Advanced Features of the iOS SDK

Automatic Reference Counting

Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) is LLVM compiler support for automatically handling memory management for Objective-C objects. Instead of the developer calling retain, release, and autorelease methods for objects created in a project, the compiler will calculate the lifetime of each object created and automatically insert the appropriate retain, release, and autorelease calls as necessary. ARC can completely avoid the error-prone and tedious manual approach to memory management, while reducing the amount of code needed and potentially even make code perform faster. ARC code can also work seamlessly with non-ARC code; for example, if a third-party library that a project depends on is not using ARC, the project ...