Question

I am trying to convert an old code to an ARC code.
However, i am getting a build error at the following line

[[token retain] autorelease];

I get 3 errors in the following order:

-‘autorelease’ is unavailable: not available in automatic reference counting mode

-[rewriter] it is not safe to remove an unused ‘autorelease’ message; its receiver may be destroyed immediately

-ARC forbids explicit message send of ‘autorelease’

If i remove this particular line, then the code compiles correctly

Answer 1

ARC manages your memory for you, so you don’t need to call “autorelease”, “release”, “retain” etc. With ARC the compiler retain and release objects as necessary for you so you don’t have to explicitly make these calls. If you want to manually manage your memory disable ARC, or you can use the compiler flag “-fno-objc-arc” to disable ARC on a specific class.