ARC also requires you explicitly break cycles, and has additional "thinking overhead" (strong/weak on properties, no pointers in structs, and some void* magic i

ARC also requires you explicitly break cycles, and has additional "thinking overhead" (strong/weak on properties, no pointers in structs, and some void* magic iirc. It's certainly better than pure manual memory management, but it's not as painless (in terms of freeing a programmer from thinking about memory allocation) as a proper GC.