C-style array of pointers to Objective-C objects under ARC
Circumventing ARC using casts is generally a bad idea. The better way would be to disable ARC for your map.m (or break out just the lookup part into a separate class).Then do manual memory management inside it with retain / release and the C structures you like, as long as you do it correctly it will work fine and you will be able to call it from other classes, avoiding the overhead of nested NSArrays etc..