Edge Cases 9: Alien Reference Counting

Wolf Rentzsch enumerates with Andrew Pontious the 5 benefits and 6 issues he sees with Apple’s new Automatic Retain Count system in the longest, most anticipated episode yet!

Links:

• Objective-C Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) « clang
• cocoaheads/sanfrancisco Wiki
• Jonathan Wight tweet: “Listening to the @edgecasesshow podcast Wolf is exactly as grumpy as he is on twitter.”
• Contrarianism by Proxy (Postmodem episode) « Nullary Sources
• Wolf Rentzsch tweet: “@dwineman @buzz that’s an exact subset of the argument I’ll be making against ARC in the next recording of @edgecasesshow”
• Wolf Rentzsch tweet: “just wrote a two-line function. Both lines had a bug in them”
• mikeash.com: Autorelease is Fast
• Matthew Bischoff tweet: “@buzz @lorenb @klaaspieter ARC is a high speed bike that looks like a tricycle to a novice.”
• Chris Cieslak tweet: “@rentzsch I like ARC, but I see it as a replacement for TYPING R/R, not KNOWING it. Can’t use CF, etc without knowing mem. mgmt.”
• Fram (oil filter) « Wikipedia
• Rich Wardwell tweet: “ARC makes good programmers better… it doesn’t help bad programmers. Bad programmers are going to write bad code either way.”
• Rich Wardwell tweet: “ARC is awesome—it saves time & stupid mistakes. Even good devs aren’t infallible; but you still have to grok what goes on behind the scenes.”
• Busted! Eight Reasons not to use ARC | Learn & Master Cocos2D Game Development
• Objective-C Garbage Collection « Wikipedia
• A garbage collector for C and C++ (Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector)
• Go-kart « Wikipedia
• mikeash/Circle - a cycle collector for Objective-C ARC « github.com
• Zing™ JVM Pauseless Garbage Collection « Azul Systems
• The Azul Garbage Collector « InfoQ
• Pauseless GC in the Azul JVM (PDF slides) « IBM Research
• Object graph « Wikipedia

Rejected Episode Titles:

• I Kinda Poked the Bear There
• Ya Take the Crumbs Where They Fall
• Autorelease the Hounds
• Leaky Abstractions Are a Death Sentence
• Maintain Your ARC Happyland
• Retain-Release Shotgun
• New Things Have Sharp Edges
• Weird Things That Programmers Are Doing
• Non-Pollyanna Points