Chapter 9. Memory Management and Debugging

Back in the good old days of iOS 3 and previous versions, the management of computer memory was a laborious affair as every pointer and memory allocation needed to be tracked precisely, lest you experienced the dreaded situation of memory leaks due to a missing release keycode in your code and so on. However, with the release of iOS 4 and higher, Apple introduced ARC and developers all over the world rejoiced as they thought that the days of memory management were over. However, sadly, this is not the case as Objective-C is not like other programming languages such as Java or C#, where there is a garbage collector that will do the memory management and garbage collection for you. ARC only serves as an enabler to simplify memory management for us so that we do not need to explicitly call the release method such as [myArray release], since ARC handles these for us. So while there are less brain cells that we need to allocate for memory...