[y14]

Automatic Reference Counting

Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to track and manage your app’s memory usage. In most cases, this means that memory management “just works” in Swift, and you do not need to think about memory management yourself. ARC automatically frees up the memory used by class instances when those instances are no longer needed.”

Excerpt From: Apple Inc. “The Swift Programming Language.” iBooks. https://itun.es/il/jEUH0.l

[bsaul]

It "automatically" works until it doesn't. Pointer semantic is the first thing i've looked, and unsurprisingly, they still have the "weak / strong" pointer semantic.

You can still point to nil pointers and crash the program because of it, and you can still have retain cycles which creates memory leaks.

That language really looks more of trying to make good compromise rather than create a revolution or a breakthrough. In a way, that feels like a much safer choice.