Summary

In this chapter, we explored the origins of ARC, the performant memory management paradigm available in Swift. With great power comes great responsibility, so you're still required to design your memory model with ARC in mind; failing to do so will lead to memory leaks or crashes caused by dangling pointers. By now, you should be comfortable with the advantages and drawbacks of both weak and unowned references. You should also understand why weak or unowned don't apply to value types. Last but not least, you should now be comfortable with setting your project up to efficiently debug memory with the tools from Xcode.

ARC sits at the compiler level, injected into your code as it is built. In the next chapter, we'll continue to refresh the basics and stretch our muscles, as we explore Foundation and the standard library.