In the Mac and iOS platforms, memory leaks are often caused by unreleased pointers. Traditionally, it has always been of utmost importance to check your allocs, copies and retains to make sure each has a corresponding release message.
The toolchain that comes with Xcode 4.2 introduces automatic reference counting (ARC) with the latest version of the LLVM compiler, that totally does away with this problem by getting the compiler to memory-manage your stuff for you. That’s pretty cool, and it does cut lots of unnecessary, mundane development time and prevent a lot of careless memory leaks that are easy to fix with proper retain/release balance. Even autorelease pools need to be managed differently when you enable ARC for your Mac and iOS apps (as you shouldn’t allocate your own NSAutoreleasePools anymore).
But what other memory leaks does it not prevent that I still have to watch out for?
As a bonus, what are the differences between ARC on Mac OS X and iOS, and garbage collection on Mac OS X?
