Platform-specific concepts

In order to understand the memory management techniques and pitfalls, one must understand some platform-related concepts. Even though Xamarin provides an almost platform agnostic development experience, iOS and Android platforms deal with memory allocations and references slightly differently from .NET CLR and each other.

Object reference types

Referred objects can be classified according to application needs. This classification helps the garbage collector decide whether the memory allocation can be released for the referred objects.

A strong reference protects the object from being "garbage collected". A referred object is said to be strongly referenced/reachable when the class instance is directly used by the current execution context.

Weak references can be used for class instances when the need for the reference does not interfere with garbage collection. When the referred object is weakly reachable, the dependent section of code has to check whether...