Conservative reference type in memory graph?

Waheiba · 2020-08-10T20:21:56.861Z

I was investigating a memory leak issue using the memory graph and I came across this reference type "Conservative"

Screen Shot 2020-08-10 at 8.55.28 PM2256×819 154 KB

I've seen before "unknown" where the graph is unable to determine if this is a strong or week reference. but this keyword is somewhat new to me.

Is this somewhat related to conservative pointer detection mechanisms?

en.wikipedia.org

Tracing garbage collection | Precise vs. conservative and internal pointers

Some collectors can correctly identify all pointers (references) in an object; these are called precise (also exact or accurate) collectors, the opposite being a conservative or partly conservative collector. Conservative collectors assume that any bit pattern in memory could be a pointer if, interpreted as a pointer, it would point into an allocated object. Conservative collectors may produce false positives, where unused memory is not released because of improper pointer identification. This is...

Jon_Shier · 2020-08-10T20:37:30.775Z

Yes, what were unknown references in Xcode 11 are now conservative in Xcode 12, so it would be great to know the difference.

John_McCall · 2020-08-10T21:16:00.011Z

This is an Xcode tooling question; nothing happened at the language-implementation level that I know of.