How does the ARC automatic memory management system track and manage object references?

ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) is a memory management system in iOS that automatically tracks the number of references to objects.

How it works:

• Each object has a reference count.
• When a new strong reference to an object is created, the count increases.
• When a reference is removed or becomes nil, the count decreases.
• If the count reaches zero, the object is automatically deallocated from memory.

ARC analyzes the code at compile time and inserts retain/release calls to manage the lifecycle of objects without manual memory management.

It is important to avoid retain cycles, where two objects hold strong references to each other, preventing memory from being released. To prevent this, weak or unowned references are used.