ARC

Definitions

1. Automatic Reference Counting — a memory management technique, most notably used in Swift and Objective-C, where the compiler inserts retain and release calls at compile time to track how many references point to each object and deallocate it when the count reaches zero.

   In plain English: A system where the compiler automatically keeps track of how many parts of your code are using an object, and frees its memory when nobody needs it anymore.

   Example: "ARC handles most memory for you, but you still need to break retain cycles with weak references."

Related Terms

• Allocator
• Autofree
• CocoaPods
• Destructor
• Guard
• RAII
• Reference Counting
• Leak Detection
• Malloc
• Nil Coalescing
• Property Wrapper
• SwiftData