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iOS: to ARC or not to ARC? Pros and Cons

i have learned about
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using ARC?

from What are the advantages and disadvantages of using ARC?

However i still doubt in automatic reference counting (ARC).

I have some queries here.

We don’t want to do the release manually, if the ARC is active?

is it do the automatic garbage collection and memory management automatically?

Could any one please clarify my thoughts.

Answer 1

ARC is not a garbage collector. Apple describes it as:

Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) is a compiler-level feature that
simplifies the process of managing object lifetimes (memory
management) in Cocoa applications.

So what ARC does it’s just adding the retain/release calls while compiling.
This helps the developer to save time and skip the writing of deallocs and other memory management calls.

Even if ARC helps a lot, this doesn’t mean that a developer should ignore memory management. Sometimes, it’s rare, but it happens, ARC is not able to figure out what to do and could generate unexpected behaviors. It’s definitely a great tool, but it’s better to understand the whole memory management routine in Objective-C before activate it and let it do its magic.