At what stage is reference counting managed automatically in ARC memory management?

In automatic memory management using ARC (Automatic Reference Counting), reference counting is handled during compilation and runtime.

• At compile time, the compiler analyzes the code and automatically inserts calls to increase (retain) and decrease (release) the reference count around object assignment and usage operations.

• During execution, these inserted calls manage the lifecycle of objects: increasing the count retains the object, decreasing the count releases it, and if the count reaches zero, the object is deallocated.

Thus, reference counting is implicitly and automatically managed during program execution, thanks to the instructions inserted by the compiler.

Example in Swift:

class Person {}

func createPerson() {
    let p = Person() // ARC increases the count
    // ... use of p
} // when exiting the function, ARC decreases the count, and the object is deallocated if there are no other references

This allows developers not to worry about manual memory management.