If the object is not autoreleased then doing a release call will deallocate the object, otherwise it will be added to the nearest autorelease pool from the curr

If the object is not autoreleased then doing a release call will deallocate the object, otherwise it will be added to the nearest autorelease pool from the current stack and be deallocated when the pool is drained. Swift and obj-c have the same ARC semantics, so I'm not sure what you mean by swift-style refcounting. It should be identical to the obj-c ARC semantics. https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AutomaticReferenceCounting.html https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AutomaticReferenceCounting.html outlines the ARC semantics, including the autorelease behavior.