What types of retention cycles can be generated with ARC?

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What types of retention cycles can be generated with ARC?

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I know that with ARC there may be leaks in iOS. What are the most frequent types of leaks and how can they be avoided?

ios objective-c

asked by anonymous 23.12.2013 / 20:03

4 answers

If I can do everything with structural programming, why did you create object-oriented? What is the difference between parseInt and + operator before a string?

score 8 · Answer 1

The main memory-related problem is retain cycles. They occur when an object has a strong pointer to a second object, and it has a strong pointer to the first. Even when all references to these objects are removed, they still refer to each other and will not be deallocated. This can also occur indirectly through a chain of objects whose last one in the chain refers to the first.

To understand this kind of problem, it's important to know how memory management works in iOS. There is no garbage collector ; instead, the reference counting mechanism is used. Each pointer strong adds 1 to the reference counter of the pointing object (in this case, the pointer retains the object). When the pointer no longer points to the object, the object reference counter is decremented by a unit (the object is said to release the pointer). The object is deallocated when its reference counter reaches zero.

That's why there are modifiers __unsafe_unretained and __weak . __unsafe_unretained does not retain the object it points to (i.e., it does not increment the object reference counter), but if the object is deallocated, the pointer points to invalid memory. The __weak does not retain the object and changes the pointer to nil when the object is deallocated. These modifiers are used to point to delegates , as you generally do not want an object to retain its delegate, which could lead to a cycle.

Another important point is that ARC does not manage memory of C types, such as those of the Core Foundation framework (eg, CGImageRef ), which are allocated using malloc() (or through a function that calls malloc() ). You are responsible for managing the memory of these objects in order to avoid memory leaks.

(Based on link )

score 2 · Answer 2

ARC is a great help to solve memory leak problems, however, this does not mean that the programmer is free of responsibilities in this regard. While there is a strong reference pointing to an object it will be alive (spending memory).

This means that it may be interesting to remove all strong references from an object (object = nil), so that it dies at a certain time instead of letting it die at the end of the application.

It is also important to use weak type references whenever possible to avoid such problems.

If there is no such care the objects will be alive forever, even when totally useless for the program.

score 1 · Answer 3

Ignoring for a moment the theoretical part, which has already been well discussed by the other answers, you can have a more practical view of these problems (at least at the most basic levels) by running Clang Static Analyzer through Xcode itself. / p>

This tool should not be used as a definitive answer to problems, but it may give you an initial overview of the most critical points in your application.

XCode > Product > Analyze (Preferably with target/scheme set to device ).

score 0 · Answer 4

Another common problem has to do with the blocks, for example if we have a property in a class that references a block and soon inside the block we use self we can create a circular reference.

@property (nonatomic, copy) MyBlock block;

self.block = ^{
                NSLog(@"object is %@", self); // retain cycle
            };

__weak me = self; 
self.block = ^{
                    NSLog(@"object is %@", me); // no retain cycle
                };