DrJokepu on Mountain Lion seems to have addressed the memory management issues in OS X

Comment on Mountain Lion seems to have addressed the memory management issues in OS X

One of the things I've noticed is that the new Xcode 4.4 (released the same time as Mountain Lion) seems to be an awful lot snappier to me. My theory is that this is happening because they might have switched Xcode from being garbage collected to ARC (since it used to be GC ever since Snow Leopard came out but GC is now deprecated).

chucknelson 14y

Does anyone know if there is a way to monitor xcode and find out if it's GC or ARC?

msbarnett 14y

You can just use otool to dump the Objective-C information out of the MachO executable:

     otool -o /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode
     .....
     Contents of (__DATA,__objc_imageinfo) section
       version 0
         flags 0x6 OBJC_IMAGE_SUPPORTS_GC

That's for Xcode 4.4. So yes, it's still being built for Garbage Collection.

binarycrusader 14y

A recent post on the Apple developer forums indicated that it is still using gc. But it's a very large, old codebase at this point so that's not surprising.

I imagine that as they drop support for older platforms and have the time, they'll slowly remove reliance on gc.

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