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A comment on iPhone Memory Management Links and Resources. Parent comment

Re:iPhone Memory Management Links and Resources by DenisM on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @01:03AM (#451731)
Windows Mobile supports garbage collection in Compact Framework without any hiccups and with less RAM (64Mb).

One could argue that WM does not have such rich applications, but to that I have two counter-arguments: 99% of iPhone apps not rich in functionality and therefore number of objects. Fatness of iPhone apps comes from graphics, not from large number of objects and GC should not be negatively affected.

My theory of all this is that Apple is taking things step-by-step, adding each feature only as it matures. Writing a good GC takes a lot of expertise and effort. It's an extra challenge that ObjC is not a managed language, unlike CLR-based languages.

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Re:iPhone Memory Management Links and Resources by andrewf on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @03:11AM (#451810)
There's already a garbage collector in the Objective-C runtime for regular Mac OS X. People targeting OS X 10.5 and higher (that's anyone writing a new app) are happily using it.

They've just chosen not to enable its usage on the iPhone.

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