Sunday, May 25, 2014

Tail Recursion, Objective-C, and ARC

Jonathon Mah:

The problem is revealed: there is work to be done after the recursive call: automatic reference counting inserted a release call for the value returned from node.next. If we were writing this with manual retain/release, one wouldn’t insert any memory management calls into this at all, because -next returns an autoreleased object. However when this is compiled under ARC, calls to objc_retainAutoreleasedReturnValue and objc_release are inserted to allow for another optimization — having the return value skip the autorelease pool entirely. Unfortunately in this case, it conflicts with tail call optimization.

[…]

In an ARC environment, tail call optimization (and thus tail recursion) is too fragile. Don’t rely on it.

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