I appreciate everyone's replies. It was a question asked in complete humility. I agree that computers can do analysis much better than humans and that the less code you write, the less you have to debug, so ARC makes a lot of sense. My question really stemmed from Apple's WWDC lecture which appeared to justify the switch on the flimsiest of grounds, ie no longer having to be confused by [NSString stringWithFormat:] vs [NSString initWithString:] which is a pretty easy memory management rule.
As my main application is 32 bit (on account of the Quicktime API), I haven't had much exposure to ARC yet. So I will be upgrading with Mavericks to ARC and AVFoundation. Thanks for all of the comments. Patrick On Sep 9, 2013, at 7:29 AM, Alex Zavatone wrote: > > On Sep 9, 2013, at 3:58 AM, Tom Davie wrote: > >> >> On 9 Sep 2013, at 09:44, Kyle Sluder <k...@ksluder.com> wrote: >> >>> Thirded. I thought I wouldn't like it. As soon as I didn't have to manage >>> retains and releases of temporary objects, the discipline completely left >>> my mind. Now whenever I go back to non-ARC code I invariably make a ton of >>> memory management errors, most of which are caught by the analyzer. >>> >>> --Kyle Sluder >>> >>> On Sep 8, 2013, at 11:18 PM, Alex Kac <a...@webis.net> wrote: >>> >>>> Bingo. We’ve been working with Cocoa/Obj-C for many years, and still we’d >>>> find weird errors that would be caused by some over-released object. We >>>> cut a ton of code with ARC, and in the end we saw reliability go up and >>>> actually even some performance. > > I think the big point is that if the compiler can figure out what is no > longer needed and can be released, and the compiler can do this (at a > reasonable cost to performance), then this is a no brainer. > > I'm sure there are special cases where you would want to do your own memory > management. And in this case, you can always flag the class files to turn > off ARC and manage memory yourself. > > Simply put, not having to worry about this gives more brain stack space to > fill up with all the other parts of Cocoa and Objective-C that we need to > keep track of and saves valuable developer time since it's now rare to have > to deal with manual memory management mistakes. > > Cheers, > - Alex Zavatone > _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
