Objective-C ARC: strong vs retain and weak vs assign

Question

There are two new memory management attributes for properties introduced by ARC, strong and weak.

Apart from copy, which is ob

Answer 1

As far as I know, strong and retain are synonyms, so they do exactly the same.

Then the weak is almost like assign, but automatically set to nil after the object, it is pointing to, is deallocated.

That means, you can simply replace them.

However, there is one special case I've encountered, where I had to use assign, rather than weak. Let's say we have two properties delegateAssign and delegateWeak. In both is stored our delegate, that is owning us by having the only strong reference. The delegate is deallocating, so our -dealloc method is called too.

// Our delegate is deallocating and there is no other strong ref.
- (void)dealloc {
    [delegateWeak doSomething];
    [delegateAssign doSomething];
}

The delegate is already in deallocation process, but still not fully deallocated. The problem is that weak references to him are already nullified! Property delegateWeak contains nil, but delegateAssign contains valid object (with all properties already released and nullified, but still valid).

// Our delegate is deallocating and there is no other strong ref.
- (void)dealloc {
    [delegateWeak doSomething]; // Does nothing, already nil.
    [delegateAssign doSomething]; // Successful call.
}

It is quite special case, but it reveal us how those weak variables work and when they are nullified.