Understanding Automatic Reference Counting in Objective-C

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25 points·rohshall··6 comments

There's a good conversation here about dealing with objects inside structs, which is discouraged in ARC: http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/310392-struct-and-...

(AFAIK the Objective-C++ compiler doesn't have this limitation, as the struct can be given an implicit copy constructor and a deconstructor.)

I was hesitant to try ARC at first - all of the tutorials I saw started with storyboards, which was terrible nonsense, and I wrongly equated that to ARC. I still think about where my pointers are, I'm just writing less code now and I love it. ARC's very, very nice.

The best part of ARC is the zeroing weak reference. Add those to the ability to send messages to nil and it really cleans up the code.

No more if(obj != nil) [obj msg]; all over the place. Very helpful when dealing with delegates.

Oh, and I agree storyboards are nonsense :)

Understanding memory management, and how things work "backstage" is always good but implementing it it's boring and very error-prone. Let's just use ARC, it's ready and it works amazingly well.

The page states that ARC is not yet ready, but keep in mind this article was written in Sept 2011.

I think ARC is definitely ready nowadays, given the number of libraries and projects using it.

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