When to weakify Self in Swift: Best Practices for Memory Management

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Memory management is a crucial aspect of iOS development, especially when working with closures and asynchronous code. In Swift, capturing self within a closure can lead to strong reference cycles, which in turn can cause memory leaks. To prevent these issues, it's important to understand when and how to use weak references effectively. This article will guide you through the scenarios where weakifying self is necessary and how to implement it.

Understanding Strong Reference Cycles

In Swift, closures capture values from their surrounding context by default. When a closure captures self, it creates a strong reference to self. If self also holds a strong reference to the closure (e.g., through a property), a strong reference cycle is created, causing both objects to retain each other indefinitely. This results in a memory leak because neither object can be deallocated.

Why did Self and Closure become the worst roommates ever?

Because Self said, “I’ll leave when Closure does,” and…