Automatic Reference Counting

Apple has now posted some ARC documentation. I love the idea of full garbage collection in principle: less code, fewer crashes, and potentially higher performance. However, due to backward compatibility, iOS, and concerns about bugs in the system frameworks, I have so far only adopted it in a few plug-ins. Automatic reference counting seems to promise the same three benefits to a slightly lesser extent, plus lower memory use, and without the drawbacks. (And the deterministic behavior seems to work very well in Python.) So I think this is a good direction for Objective-C. Overall, though, I tend to agree with Andrew Abernathy:

From my perspective, most obj-c devs think manual ref counting problems overblown, problems of alternatives under-appreciated.

Between autorelease pools and accessors, I don’t have to think about memory management much, and it has not tended to be where I write my bugs.

Update (2011-06-16): Lots of good information from Apple’s Chris Lattner.

Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) Memory Management Objective-C Programming

What We Talk About When We Talk About RSS

Brent Simmons:

Here’s what I think is actually dead: the notion that software that makes you subscribe to feeds that you run across in your browser will ever cross the chasm.

It’s not entirely clear to me why this is, because it doesn’t seem much different from following someone on Twitter, but this does seem to be the case.