Attention all Mac developers! You know how when your city changes its trash-collection policies it leads to months of confusion? That’s about to happen on the Mac App Store: If you want to continue selling apps there, you’ll have to switch how you collect your garbage.
On Friday, Apple posted a notice to its developer portal, asking app devs to make sure that their Mac App Store submissions use Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), instead of garbage-collection memory management.
Garbage collection is a feature in Objective-C 2.0. In computer science, garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management, in which a garbage collector attempts to reclaim memory that is occupied by objects that are no longer being used by a program.
Apple deprecated Garbage Collection in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, in favor of ARC, which provides a more efficient form of automated memory management with Objective-C. Now Apple’s putting its foot down, insisting that devs transition to ARC before May 1 if they want to continue selling or updating their apps on the Mac App Store.
To make the transition easier, the migration assistant in Xcode can help convert garbage-collecting apps to ARC. By most accounts, ARC looks like it’s more efficient, and should help with speedier apps, so this is a win-win for everyone.
Source: Apple Developer Portal
