Swift Memory Management: Unraveling ARC and Taming Strong Reference Cycles

Take full control of memory in your Swift apps by diving into Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) and mastering the art of breaking strong reference cycles

ML Musings
3 min readJul 30, 2023
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

As a Swift developer, understanding memory management is crucial to building efficient and robust applications. Swift employs Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to manage memory, automatically deallocating objects that are no longer in use. While ARC simplifies memory management, it also introduces challenges, particularly when dealing with strong reference cycles.

Let’s delve into the intricacies of Swift memory management, explore ARC in-depth, and learn how to tackle strong reference cycles to prevent memory leaks and enhance your app’s performance.

Understanding Automatic Reference Counting (ARC)

In Swift, Automatic Reference Counting is the mechanism used to track and manage instances of classes, ensuring that memory is deallocated when no longer needed. Every time you create a new instance of a class, ARC assigns it a reference count of 1. As you create additional references to the same instance, the reference count increases, and when references are…

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ML Musings
ML Musings

Written by ML Musings

✨ I enjoy pushing the boundaries of JS, Python, SwiftUI and AI. You can support my work through coffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/MLMusings

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