[Interest] [OSX/iOS] Garbage collection still in place in Qt?

[Till Oliver Knoll]

> Am 03.03.2015 um 15:50 schrieb Raul Metsma <raul at metsma.ee>:
> 
> ARC is supported since OSX 10.7 (10.6 limited) and 64bit only.

Again, while it makes sense for an application - and all its supporting libraries such as Qt - to use ARC, that is (will be on May 1st 2015) not a hard requirement (yet): applications may still use the traditional (manual) retain/release memory management.

Only new application submissions using "garbage collection" will be rejected from that date onwards (that includes updates for existing Mac App Store applications).

So Qt could still support OS X 10.6 and 32 bit, if that was the point of your statement.

Or maybe you just wanted to repeat a well-known fact :)

That said, IIRC official OS X 10.6 support was dropped quite some time ago by Qt, so that would be a non-issue anyway.


So the real question remains: does Qt still have some "garbage collection left-overs", and if so, is this being considered and maybe (hopefully) even being work in progress, to either move the Qt libs forward to use ARC (requires some brainwork as soon as you interface Cocoa with the C/C++ world: you need to tell the compiler who is responsible to release memory: ARC or "the other side of the bridge (C/C++)"), or at least replace "garbage collection" with explicit retain/release management (requires probably even more brainwork: after all there was a reason to let the "garbage collector" do all the hard work ;))

Cheers,
  Oliver