Apologies for the basic question, but why would this 'analog' (is that another system? An abstraction?) have this issue if it is using ARC? Isn't ARC just a flag in XCode's compiler? If RubyMotion turns it on, wouldn't XCode make all the necessary arrangements? Again, I simply want to understand; I'm not trying to make a point.
It's NOT using ARC. It's using an "analog" (in the original post's words).
With which he means "a substitute", "a similar tech", "their own implementation of the same concept", "something analogous to ARC" (hence the "analog").
(Most people know "analog" only as in "analog vs digital", but it was immediately obvious to me, because I know the etymology of the word from the original language it was adopted from.
Btw, the english dictionary definition that's closer for such a use of the word is:
1. An organ or structure that is similar in function to one in another kind of organism but is of dissimilar evolutionary origin. The wings of birds and the wings of insects are analogs.).
Personally, I use "analog" to mean "not digital" and "analogue" to mean "something similar to". I think that's a little clearer, at least to some US readers.
RubyMotion doesn't use ARC (or Xcode) at all -- it doesn't produce Objective-C code as its output, but executable bytecode intended to be run on the target. The output of Objective-C and RubyMotion, that is, is the same. So you need an equivalent implementation of ARC in RubyMotion to deal with memory management, unless you want to do it manually, which wouldn't make RubyMotion very Ruby-like at all.
