&gt; ARC has neither of those disadvantages and so provides convincing alternative to GC, and AFAIK is the first and unique to do so.<p>I love what Apple has done with ARC: they&#x27;ve taken a very inefficient approach to garbage collection, one which has repeatedly shown to be the &quot;worst case&quot; algorithm with the worst performance characteristics, and then proceeded to convince legions of developers that that same approach is actually the best one.