When you compile a program that uses external libraries or frameworks, the last step (or a step near the end, at least) is to hook up all of the functions, etc. you use in your program to their implementations in the libraries. This is called “linking”.¹

A while back, Apple realized that when they added new features to their frameworks (usually with the release of each new OS version), people might want to take advantage of them, but remain backwards-compatible with old OSs. So they added a feature called weak linking. Apple wasn’t the first to realize that…

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In the Cocoa world, the big news from WWDC is the advent of Automatic Reference Counting, or ARC. The only real documentation for the system is an unlinked reference page on the Clang website, but as Clang is open source and the implementation’s in the latest builds now, that counts as public information.

The Cocoa frameworks have long used a reference-count-based system, but as of Mac OS X v10.5, Apple added optional garbage collection. As with most GC systems, you can mark certain references as __weak (which automatically become nil when their target is collected), and the actual collection of…

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