Garbage collection

Garbage collection (GC) is one of the most effective automated memory management techniques on modern application development platforms. In simple terms, with automated garbage collection, memory resources are allocated for objects used by the application and reclaimed for resources no longer needed by the application.

Note

In spite of the fact that garbage collection, as an automated process, takes over the burden of managing memory allocations, it can have a significant impact on performance. This performance handicap is one of the main reasons why there is no garbage collection mechanism on the iOS platform.

In theory, GC is responsible for reclaiming memory resources occupied by runtime elements that cannot be reached by the current executing application. However, this mechanism cannot always identify these unreachable resources correctly and/or have unexpected results while purging the identified memory pointers.

Memory leaks occur when an application fails to identify...