How To Enable ARC in a Cocos2D 2.X Project

[rwenderlich]

This is the official thread to discuss the following blog post: How To Enable ARC in a Cocos2D 2.X Project

[Romyilano]

Thank you so much for posting this! I almost gave up doing some of the Cocos2D tutorials, silly me. Other methods to make Cocos2D arc compatible were blowing up my computer.

Where would newbies be without this site?

[mojo]

great tutorial. This is exactly what I needed to get back to cocos2D. I stopped developing for cocos2d in the 0.9.8 era and when i started again after all this time it left me confused. Thanks for this tutorial.

[World of A]

I disagree flagging on a per-source-file basis with -fno-objc-arc. It is a way to do it, but it will be pretty hard to maintain your code when you update Cocos2d! Instead take a look at another approach : http://www.learn-cocos2d.com/2012/04/enabling-arc-cocos2d-project-howto-stepbystep-tutorialguide/

Here's a quote from Steffen in that tut:

Warning: Some recommend to use the -fno-objc-arc Compiler Flag to disable ARC on a per-source-file basis. This is only helpful if you have very few source code files which require this flag where an extra static library target would be overkill. Since you’ll have to add the flag to each cocos2d source code file individually – one-by-one – and there being anywhere between 100 and 150 source files, I strongly discourage going down this road. Plus it will be a maintenance nightmare whenever you upgrade cocos2d.

[rwenderlich]

@World of A: Heh, and I disagree with that :]

Code: Select all

Since you’ll have to add the flag to each cocos2d source code file individually – one-by-one – and there being anywhere between 100 and 150 source files, I strongly discourage going down this road.

That is actually untrue - if you select the files and hit "Enter" in Xcode you can set all of them at once.

So upgrading to a new version of Cocos2D is no problem, since setting that flag on the files only takes < 10 seconds. :]

I'm not saying the library approach is bad - there are some nice things about doing it that way - but this way has the advantage of being nice and easy.

[Pianisimo]

I just updated cocos to latest version cocos2d-iphone-2.1-rc0a, followed all the steps, seems working fine but there is a warning in appDelegate.m which worries me.

inside the method:

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- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions
{
   [director_ setDelegate:navController_];
}

the warning says:
sending 'UINAvigationController *_strong to parameter of incompatible type 'id<CCDirectorDelagete>'

Is this something I should ignore, or should I do anything else.

[sir_seagill]

I tried the static library approach... ran into errors. this method worked for me, so yes this is easier

[RHerrema]

I've followed all the steps you've suggested, but when I build I get an error message: 'Expected ';' at end of declaration list' for this line in the AppDelegate.h file:

CCDirectorIOS *_unsafe_unretained director_; // weak ref

which seems strange, since the ';' is there. I'm using Xcode 4.5.2.