Memory Management Deep Dive (ARC / Ownership)

Question

Walk through how memory is managed in your primary language. For Swift/Objective-C: explain ARC, strong/weak/unowned references, and how retain cycles form and are broken. For C++: RAII, smart pointers, and move semantics.

What this round covers

• Depth on the runtime/ownership model, not buzzwords
• Concrete examples of leaks you have debugged
• Trade-offs of manual vs automatic memory management

Tips

Apple values engineers who reason precisely about memory behavior on constrained devices. Bring a real bug you found with Instruments/Valgrind.