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
Whaaaaaat?
You heard right: if you want to forget about using retain, release and autorelease in your code, then the newly introduced automatic reference counting (ARC) mechanism (aka “automatic memory management”) is the way to go. And guess what?
Kobold2D Preview 6 fully supports ARC out of the box!
You may have heard that Cocos2D is incompatible with ARC at this time, and you’re right. However, the Cocos2D version in Kobold2D Preview 6 released just now has been improved to work with ARC. This post explains the most important changes to make Cocos2D compatible with ARC. All 15 Kobold2D example projects compile with and without ARC, just like the other libraries Kobold2D makes use of!
