Introduction to Garbage Collection

Describes the garbage collection system for Cocoa.

Who Should Read This Document?

If you are developing applications using Cocoa, you should read at least Garbage Collection for Cocoa Essentials to gain an understanding of the garbage collection system. It is strongly recommended that you also read Adopting Garbage Collection and Implementing a finalize Method . You are expected to already understand the Objective-C language (see The Objective-C Programming Language ) and to have some familiarity with Cocoa.

Organization of This Document

The following articles explain the problems the garbage collection system addresses, the solutions it provides, its basic functionality, and common tasks you might perform:

Garbage Collection for Cocoa Essentials describes the essential details of the garbage collection system for Cocoa. At a minimum, you should read this article.

Adopting Garbage Collection describes issues related to adopting garbage collection.

Architecture describes the design goals and architecture of the technology, and the benefits you get from using it.

Using Garbage Collection describes some of the features you can take advantage of when you use garbage collection, and some of subtleties you need to be aware of.

Implementing a finalize Method describes how to correctly implement a finalize method.

Inapplicable Patterns describes Cocoa programming patterns that are not applicable to garbage collection.

Using Core Foundation with Garbage Collection describes how to use Core Foundation objects with garbage collection.

Garbage Collection API provides a summary of API used in garbage collection.

Introduction to Garbage Collection

Who Should Read This Document?

Organization of This Document

See Also