Totally agree. ARC is excellent and almost always completely transparent. When you're doing something unusual (like storing a pointer to an ObjC object in a C struct or something), there are very simple compiler hints that keep everything happy.
It's so much nicer than all the faff of manual retain/release before (and probably nicer than ObjC garbage collection, but I started ObjC after that was already discouraged, afair).
Re:Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga
by iainmerrick on Monday April 23, 2018 @05:06AM
(#16901758)
Come to think of it, garbage collection was an obvious “me too!” feature to catch up with Java and C#, but proved misguided because it didn’t fit well with Objective-C.
ARC was less obvious, but quickly proved to be a much better approach (edit to add: for the typical use cases of Obj-C )
It makes me wonder whether Swift’s vtables and generics are just “me too!” features, this time chasing after C++ fans... Maybe not a great idea, as they’ve also picked up some of the bad stuff like exploding compile times.
Re:Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga
by apple4ever on Monday April 23, 2018 @11:17AM
(#16904141)
Me too. I absolutely love Objective-C and its syntax. Admittedly it takes some time to get use to and understand, but once you do, its beautiful.
For me the addition of Automated Reference Counting was key. That took a while bunch of tedious but essential boilerplate out of the language. Before ARC, Obj-C was a weird but interesting language that I didn’t want to use. With ARC it all came together into a nice expressive high-level language with raw C power available when you need it.