Is it too early to use ARC for new projects?

Question

I'm about to start a new project and I'm wondering whether I should use ARC or not.

I don't know if it's recommended to use ARC when I know that the new project will have quite a lot of dependencies on older code and external libraries which have not been converted to ARC yet (three20, shareKit, ASIHTTPRequest,..) ? Some of the libs are quite big so I think it'll be tedious to add the -fno-objc-arc flag for each separate file.

It seems that Apple has went the ARC way definitely for IOS and every IOS developer will have to convert sooner or later.

But is it maybe just too early to jump on the ARC bandwagon yet ?

Answer 1

Compiled libraries will work with ARC out of the box. All ARC does is add the memory management automatically. It'll add the retains, releases etc. If the code is already compiled, it'll contain the necessary memory management, regardless of whether it was compiled with ARC or not.

If you're adding 3rd party code directly to your application, then you'll need to make sure that code works with ARC, but you don't need to change anything for compiled libraries and frameworks.

Apple are pushing ARC as the way forward, so for a new project, I don't think there should be any problems with using it.