[MacRuby-devel] Substituting garbage collection with automatic reference counting

[sohocoke at gmail.com]

How fundamental is garbage collection in various aspects of MacRuby?

a. Is garbage collection a hard requirement for MacRuby to be a ruby implementation, i.e. Does Ruby itself as a language / platform / runtime pose garbage collection as more or less a hard requirement? I wouldn't have thought so, but I'd like to hear the opinions of the more experienced.

b. Are there parts of MacRuby, other than the area around object creation and lifecycle management, that depend on garbage collection in a major way, such that thinking of MacRuby and ARC on the same page would not make any practical sense?

c. Could ARC be something that gc.c uses as an implementation feature, rather than the obj-c runtime GC in its current form, such that an ARC version of MacRuby could be created through relatively isolated changes in the memory management area?

The background to this question is that I had observed a fair amount of keenness in the iOS development community to program with Ruby. I even remember seeing a trigger-happy blog article about MacRuby for iOS a few months back when most likely the ARC feature was mistaken for garbage collection.

I'm uncertain how larger-than-reality my observation was, but I for one would be much happier if I could write iOS apps using MacRuby.