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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T17:52:36+00:00

I’m revisiting an an older project and converting to ARC, my first time through

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I’m revisiting an an older project and converting to ARC, my first time through Xcode’s conversion tool (Edit -> Refactor -> Convert to Objective-C ARC...), and I’m seeing a couple things that I’m not sure are real issues or red herrings somehow.

I get, as expected a big list of things that the tool finds that prevent it from completing, but:

  1. Many (all?) instances of retain/release/autorelease appear to be flagged as errors e.g. “release is unavailable: not available in automatic reference counting mode”. Am I really supposed to get rid of all these myself? I thought that’s what the tool did.

  2. In many of my classes, I’m seeing a bunch of errors that look like phantom parse/build errors that have nothing to do with ARC. E.g. in a simple class that apparently has no ARC-related issues, I’ll get an “undeclared identifier” on some arbitrary method implementation, and then a bunch of “Parse error: expected }” at the end of the file, etc. These are not real– the project builds fine, and I don’t see any proximate cause or resolution for the errors.

There are “real” issues in the list as well (expected bridging issues that need to be explicitly clarified in code) but there are so many random errors of the above variety that it’s hard to even find the signal in the noise. This seems wrong to me.

Am I misunderstanding what this tool is really doing? Apple’s docs say this:

Xcode provides a tool that automates the mechanical parts of the ARC
conversion (such as removing retain and release calls) and helps you
to fix issues the migrator can’t handle automatically

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Took a long time to resolve, but both of these issues seemed to stem from some custom macros I was using. I had a macro for release-and-set-to-nil that I was using frequently, like this:

    #define RELEASENIL(x)   [(x) release]; \
                        (x) = nil;

    I’m still not sure why, but for some reason, the ARC conversion tool didn’t take this in stride, and choked on it, throwing the release warnings and the parse errors. (Some interaction with the preprocessor?) When I changed the macro to remove the release line, the conversion proceeded much more in line with my expectations.

    And yes, it does of course remove the messages for you. (I’m answering my own question on the off chance that someone else ever has this issue.)

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