Xcode update 4.6.1 supports launching ARC apps on 10.6

From the Mac App Store

http://imgur.com/UROGPKN

Specifically, fixes an issue where ARC-enabled apps would not launch on 10.6…Shane has commented on this in the past, would this mean that ARC-enabled apps are now able to be run on 10.6 if using AppleScriptObjC or would this only apply to Obj-C?

Just wondering and figured I would kick off discussion on the most recent update.

As far as I know, ARC only applies to Objective-C. AppleScriptObjC uses garbage collection, or some form of it, which is now deprecated (don’t know how this applies to AppleScriptObjC though).

Remember: AppleScriptObjC is not a programming language like Objective-C is, it is only a scripting language with a bridge to Cocoa. This is why some features are not available in AppleScriptObjC.

AppleScriptObjC apps can run under ARC – but only on OS X 10.8. So to that extent, there was no problem writing ARC-based ASObjC apps with 4.6, because 10.6 support was out anyway.

That’s not to say ASObjC apps actually use ARC directly. Before 10.8, ASObjC relied on garbage collection (or manual memory management). In 10.8, the ASObjC runtime code manages memory for ASObjC code by itself, hence the support for both ARC and GC.

At some stage GC support is going to disappear. Hopefully it won’t be for a while yet.

Interesting. Thank you Shane! Informative, as always :wink: