Some of the most commonly used libraries for application development

Apple includes numerous software libraries (i.e., frameworks and services) that provide the interfaces needed to write software for the OS X and iOS platforms. Some of the most commonly used libraries for application development are depicted in Figure 6-5.

Figure 6-5. Apple Application frameworks and services

The application programming interfaces (APIs) for some of these libraries are written in Objective-C, and thus may be used directly in your Objective-C programs. The APIs for the majority of these libraries are written in ANSI C, and hence may also be used directly in your Objective-C programs.

You may recall from Chapter 4 that ARC provides automatic memory management for Objective-C objects and block objects. The Apple software libraries with C-based APIs do not integrate with ARC. Thus, you are responsible for programmatically performing memory management when dynamically allocating memory with these C-based APIs. In fact, when using ARC, it is prohibited to perform standard casts between pointers of Objective-C objects and pointers of other types (e.g., one that is a part of an Apple C–based API). Apple provides several mechanisms (toll-free bridging and ARC bridged casts) to facilitate the use of C-based APIs in Objective-C programs. You will look at these next.