Summary

Memory management is often considered a difficult topic, but when you break it down, you can see that it is relatively straightforward. In this chapter, we saw that all data in a computer is either stored in the filesystem, which is a slow permanent storage, or in memory, which is a fast but temporary location. The filesystem is used as a backup to memory, slowing down the computer greatly, so that we as programmers should minimize the amount of memory we ever use at one time.

We saw that in Swift, there are value types and reference types, which are critical to understand how we can reduce memory usage and eliminate memory leaks. Memory leaks are created when an object has a strong reference to itself through a third party, which is called a strong reference cycle. We must also be careful that we keep at least one strong reference to every object that we want to keep around or we may lose it prematurely.

With practice programming, you will get better and better at both preventing...