ARC, Blocks and Retain Cycles

Question

Working on an iOS project that targets 4.0 and 5.0, using ARC.

Running into an issue related to blocks, ARC and referencing an object from outside the block. Here\'s

Answer 1

Assuming progress guarantees, a retain cycle might be exactly what you want. You explicitly break the retain cycle at the end of the block, so it's not a permanent retain cycle: when the block is called, the cycle is broken.

If you have something else keeping the operation around, though, you can store a reference into either a __weak or __unsafe_unretained variable and then use that from within your block. There's no need to __block-qualify the variable unless you for some reason need to change the variable's binding during the block; since you don't have a retain cycle to break any more, you shouldn't need to assign anything to the weak variable.