How to disable Xcode4.2 Automatic Reference Counting How to disable Xcode4.2 Automatic Reference Counting xcode xcode

How to disable Xcode4.2 Automatic Reference Counting


  • Click on you project, in the left hand organizer.
  • Select your target, in the next column over.
  • Select the Build Settings tab at the top.
  • Scroll down to "Objective-C Automatic Reference Counting" (it may be listed as "CLANG_ENABLE_OBJC_ARC" under the User-Defined settings group),
  • and set it to NO.

This is on Xcode 4.2 (Build 4D199).


In Xcode 4.2 beta, there were 2 places per target that you could toggle the use of ARC... now there seems to be NONE.

Also, the "Convert to ARC" menu item seems to have disappeared.

Now, yes, I suppose that the ARC stuff was never meant for Mac Developers, as 4.2 beta was iOS only, but not exactly sure what Mac developers who did play with the ARC stuff in their Mac Apps are supposed to do now....

File Radar Reports. Wait for 4.3? redo the app? Edit the .xcode XML manually? Not sure.


Disable ARC or enable MRC

You should operate by C flags

//enable ARC-fobjc-arc//disable ARC-fno-objc-arc

You have three options:

  1. Local - Compile Sources
  2. Global - OTHER_CFLAGS
  3. Global - CLANG_ENABLE_OBJC_ARC

[Under the hood]