Good news for iOS developers!

[JuLieN]

With yesterday's release of the beta version of iOS 5 SDK, Apple updated LLVM to its 3rd version, and... implemented a garbage collector in iOS! (At last!). Actually, this will not only work with iOS 5 but even with iOS 4.x. No more manual reference counting!



This is handled by the OS (both in IOS and MacOS X) with a system called Automatic Reference Counting (ARC).

Xcode even includes a function to upgrade your projects (both MacOS X and iOS) to ARC: it will NOT modify your objective-C code (so you don't get lost), but it will ignore the unnecessary code at compile time.

ARC will be activated by default for your new projects.

[mar]

Well perphaps I'm one of the few who don't like garbage collectors at all and prefer to do memory management themselves so I hope this ARC will be optional I don't know whether this only affects Objective C or C++ as well (have seen garbage collectors for C/C++, see http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/).
The problem with GCs is that they eat up memory until they hit a limit and do GC which usually pauses all threads. You can't avoid memory fragmentation (unless it would compact heap and change references which I doubt [too expensive]), but you can with proper ordering of new/delete (alloc/free).
Don't know whether this is still a problem these days

Martin

[JuLieN]

Sorry, I HAD to share this picture that made me smile. (And the alien is the news host in Futurama

And BTW, the blog it comes from is really interesting too. Any Cocoa developer should bookmark it:

http://cocoasamurai.blogspot.com/