Swift Translation Guide for Objective-C Users: Develop and Design

Chapter 11. Memory Management

Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of Objective-C in years past was memory management. In the early days, memory management involved manual reference counting—the explicit act of indicating your intention to retain a reference to an object and then release it when you were finished.

Although Apple dabbled with garbage collection in OS X development for a while, reference counting was the only means of memory management for iOS, and it remained popular on OS X. Eventually, automatic reference counting (ARC) was introduced to Objective-C, and although the underlying process was the same, the hard work of deciding when and where to retain and release objects was performed mainly by the compiler rather than ...