iOS Guy

As soon as I heard about ARC I thought “WOW, this is amazing! A compiler-time garbage collector! Why didn’t anyone think about this before!?”.

But then even after migrating to iOS 5 I got a little scared about changing the compiler and the whole memory management schema that I have been using my entire life.   Actually I was waiting to being able to work on a new project so that I could start using these new concepts. It turns out I couldn’t wait anymore and decided to migrate this huge project I am working on to ARC. Not only for the promise of “running faster”, but also for education (in the end I love to explore and learn new ways of writing code).

After migrating the source code by using the automatic migration tool provided by Xcode 4.2.1 (and set the Simulator as deployment target hahahah) I was immediately able to see that natural code just works. That is the way Apple wants us to think about using ARC. And my impression tells me this is totally possible.

But I am a man full of questions about the meaning of life and all this crap, so I couldn’t just believe on that and started to watch some ARC talks Apple has done to comprehend how this magic works behind the scenes. Truth is I can’t live with something I don’t understand when it comes to coding.

Although ARC is pretty simple, here are some annotations I have made that really helped me to understand “da magic”.

First of all there are 5 things you cannot forget:

1) Strong references. Every variable is a strong reference and is implicit released after it’s scope ends. A strong reference is the same thing as a retained reference that you don’t manage. For example:

When you declare NSString *name; the compiler understands you actually meant __strong NSString *name;. And this means you don’t need to retain the reference nor release it afterwards anymore.

- (id)init { 

self = [super init]; 

if (self) { 

name = [@"Name" retain]; 

}

return self;

}

- (void)dealloc { 

[name release]; 

[super dealloc];

}

becomes

- (id)init { 

self = [super init]; 

if (self) { 

name = @"Name"; 

} 

return self;

}

2) Autoreleasing References. Every out-parameter is already retained and autoreleased for you.

- (void)method: (NSObject **)param { *param = …; } 

means

- (void)method: (__autoreleasing NSObject **)param { 

*param = … retain] autorelease];


}

3) Unsafe references. If you see this, keep in mind you are working with a non-initialized, no-extra compiler logic and no restrictions variable. An unsafe reference tells ARC not to touch it and as a result what you get is the same as an assign property. The advantage here is: you can use this inside structs. But be warned this can easily dangling references.

 __unsafe_unretained NSString *name = name; 

4) Weak References. Works like an assign property, but becomes nil as soon as the object starts deallocation.

 __weak NSString *name = name; 

If you want to create a reference weak, just add __weak before the variable declaration or weak to the property instead of the old assign parameter.

5) Return Values. They never transfer ownership (ARC does a retain and returns a autoreleased object for you) unless the selector starts with alloc, copy, init, mutableCopy or new. In these cases ARC returns a +1 reference (for you), which you also don’t need to bother with on the caller side due to the rules we discussed above.

Now that you know how ARC works and what it does, you can write natural code in peace =)