[mpweiher]

>I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when they were discussing ARC versus GC.

Apple shipped a tracing GC (RC is a form of GC) for a while, but couldn't get it to work reliably or with adequate performance. ARC was a bit of a "Hail Mary" and is problematic in its own right, but certainly better than the GC it replaced.

Marcel

[thevibesman]

> ARC was a bit of a "Hail Mary" and is problematic in its own right

I'm just curious with your experience what you are pointing to as problematic. Other than potential extra release calls in tight loops, the main downside I saw was it made the use of C structs way less appealing---at the same time, I wouldn't want to with manually memory managed C structs in GCD blocks.

[mpweiher]

Problems:

- Lots of extra retains/releases can cause significant and unpredictable performance degradation, and even crashes: http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/compiler-writers-gone-wil...

- The language went from fun dynamic, optionally statically typed to strict static typing that restricts exploratory programming: http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/03/cargo-cult-typing-or-obje... http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/05/the-spidy-subset-or-avoid...

- People no longer write class-side convenience initialisers :-((

- The benefits are mostly marginal, and the non-marginal benefits are needlessly bundled with ARC

- The C interaction model of the Objective-C hybrid language was made much more complex, somewhat defeating the purpose of a hybrid language

That's off the top of my head.