So, you’ve heard about Objective-C automatic reference counting (ARC). And you’ve read about it here and there and every where. But you’re not using it.
Guess what? You’re not alone. There are developers out there who refuse to use ARC, who delay using it, who believe they just can’t use it or expressly decided against using ARC for the time being. They all have their reasons.
Most of them are wrong.
Here’s a summary of reasons I’ve heard (repeatedly) in the past months from developers who aren’t using ARC, or have tried it but gave up using it. And I’ll tell you why these rationalizations are wrong, or at least over-inflated. Continue reading »
I have no doubt that automatic reference counting (ARC) is the next big leap forward for Objective-C since the introduction of Objective-C 2.0. ARC allows you to put the burden of memory management on the (Apple LLVM 3.0) compiler, and never think about retain, release and autorelease ever again.
Since many user’s first experiences with ARC will be trying to convert an existing app, they will learn the hard way that converting existing code to ARC is not a fire & forget operation. And since this is the Internet, there’s also a lot of assumptions, false statements and other myths revolving around ARC going around.
So here’s just about everything you need to know about ARC, and some ARC-mythbusting too.
- Development Requirements for ARC apps
- Minimum Deployment Targets for ARC apps
- Required Deployment Targets with zeroing weak references
- How to enable ARC in your project
- Compile errors after switching to LLVM 3.0
- Getting third party libraries to build with ARC
- Converting an existing app to ARC
- “Cannot Convert to Objective-C ARC”
- Fixing pointer types in C structs
- Fixing C/C++ pointer transfers with bridged casts
- Fixing NSAutoreleasePool with @autoreleasepool
- Methods you can’t call (or override) anymore
- You can still override -(void) dealloc {}
- Property naming restriction
- New Property keywords: strong and weak
- ARC forbids synthesizing a readonly property without ownership qualifier
- For experts: detecting at compile-time if ARC is enabled
- For experts: allow use of ARC keywords with ARC disabled
- Myth: ARC has not been proven reliable
- Myth: ARC takes away control over Memory Management
- ARC Reference Documentation
