except ARC is better than Linus was imagining in the above, because it manages to do it without the "explicitly visible" part I haven't read the article you're

except ARC is better than Linus was imagining in the above, because it manages to do it without the "explicitly visible" part I haven't read the article you're linking, but how does ARC manage to keep this invisible? The usual trouble is supporting legacy code. Even with C++/Boost, where there's a variety of _ptr templates each promising either automatic deletion or automatic reference count decrement at an appropriate time, you can find yourself in a situation where there's a legacy C function accepting and returning, say, wchar_t*. You simply cannnot avoid doing malloc/free or retain/release in this situation.