Re: Automatic Reference Counting

[David Chisnall]

On 7 Jul 2011, at 20:52, Ondřej Hošek wrote:

> They remain untouched by ARC. ObjC pointers are detected using
> semantic analysis -- a heuristic along the lines of "oh, an asterisk,
> I'm taking over" would break everything (including the "strict
> superset of C" philosophy).


C or C++.  ARC works extremely nicely with Objective-C++.  C++ structures can 
contain Objective-C pointers, but then they become non-POD types and have a 
destructor added that releases the Objective-C ivars.  C++ templates can take 
Objective-C types and will have the retain / release calls added automatically. 
 This means that you can write things like:

std::map<int, __weak NSString*> foo;

The variable foo will then be a(n ordered) map from integers to NSStrings.  If 
you do:

id a = foo[12];

Then a will be nil if the string that was inserted into the collection has been 
deallocated before this line is reached.  

This makes Objective-C++ a lot nicer to work with - you don't need to worry 
about memory management for Objective-C objects, it happens automatically even 
when you store them in C++ variables.  You don't have to think about copy 
constructors calling retain and so on, all of this Just Works™.

David

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