Does iOS 5 have garbage collection?

Do I no longer have to worry abou开发者_开发百科t memory management iOS 5 onwards? Also, will all programs written for iOS 4 and earlier versions have to be rewritten to allow iOS to manage the memory for you?

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You appear to be talking about Automatic Reference Counting, mentioned in other answers. ARC is a kind of GC in that it automates memory freeing, but has a number of differences from a good garbage collector.

Firstly, it's mainly a compiler technology. The compiler knows about Cocoa's reference-counting guidelines, so it inserts retains and releases where they should be according to the rules. It works just like if you'd written the retains and releases yourself — it simply inserts them for you. Normal garbage collectors keep track of your program's memory while it is running.

Second, since it is just like retain and release, it can't catch retain cycles (if Object A retains Object B and Object B retains Object A, and nothing else references either of them, they both become immortal). You need to take the same precautions to prevent them.

It also uses resources differently from an automatic garbage collector. The garbage collectors used with Objective-C have to scan for unreferenced memory and collect it — which is expensive, and can lead to "stuttering" on slower systems — but they only have to do this occasionally, and in theory can even fine-tune their collection cycles to match how a program actually uses its memory. In general, a GC program will use more memory than a non-GC program and will slow down significantly when the GC decides to collect. ARC, on the other hand, moves the "scanning" to compile-time and frees memory as soon as it's available, but it has to constantly update object reference counts instead of waiting for garbage to build up like a collector.

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On Apple's public iOS 5 page, they state:

Automatic Reference Counting

Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) for Objective-C makes memory management the job of the compiler. By enabling ARC with the new Apple LLVM compiler, you will never need to type retain or release again, dramatically simplifying the development process, while reducing crashes and memory leaks. The compiler has a complete understanding of your objects, and releases each object the instant it is no longer used, so apps run as fast as ever, with predictable, smooth performance.

It's a compiler feature; not an OS feature so I don't see why it wouldn't work with older versions.

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Automatic Reference Counting implements automatic memory management for Objective-C objects and blocks, freeing the programmer from the need explicitly insert retains and releases.

You will worry less about memory management. There is public info available on the subject:

• ARC replacing GC? (lists.apple.com)
• Automatic Reference Counting (clang.llvm.org). This is the tech spec on ARC.

If the spec is too harsh to read, in short, you will need to edit the retain/release code to use ARC, but old programs remain compatible. What you shouldn't do is mix both.