Is it possible to see Objective-C ARC output?

Question

In xcode, it's possible given some Objective-C code, to see the code it would output in Assembly.
Is it possible to see given ARC enabled code, to see the Objective-C that would be outputted by ARC?

Answer 1

It is not possible, because ARC does not produce Objective-C code. ARC is a compiler feature that modifies the assembly produced in the same way that enabling optimizations might do. You can't tell the compiler to show you "optimized" C code; the optimizations are not applied at the level of C code. Likewise, you cannot ask to see the "ARC-ified" Objective-C, because the ARC memory management calls are not applied at the level of Objective-C code.

If you really want to see where the memory management calls are being made, you'll have to look at the assembly.

Answer 2

ARC doesn't as such output Objective-C, it a phase of the compiler which alters the assembler/machine code the compiler produces - and as you noted you can see that in Xcode. However if you use a decompiler on the binary you should see a "MRC equivalent", which is as good as you'll get. Try Hopper - demo available, I've not used it myself, don't know the producers, etc. However it produces psuedo-code, which looks like structured assembly, not Objective-C. HTH.