Summary

To handle the complexities of memory management for reference types such as classes, Swift employs Automatic Reference Counting (ARC). ARC tracks the number of references to each instance, automatically releasing the allocated memory when an instance is no longer needed. This prevents memory leaks and keeps our application performance at its best. However, developers must be aware of strong reference cycles, where objects hold strong references to each other, preventing ARC from deallocating them and causing memory leaks.

Swift provides mechanisms like weak and unowned references to break strong reference cycles. Weak references enable the referenced object to be deallocated, while unowned references assume the object will always be in memory. By properly using these references, developers can ensure their applications are efficiently managing memory and do not have memory leaks.

In the next chapter, we will look at access controls in Swift.