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{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"[MNT]: Re-enable Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) for macOS backend.","articleBody":"### Summary\n\n@greglucas mentioned that he is interested in moving the macOS backend to ARC. This was previously attempted in #23060, caused a crash in #23653, and reverted in #23654.\n\nAfter my memory-management PR lands, enabling ARC should be relatively straightforward.\n\nThe one issue is that we store Obj-C objects into C structs (allocated by `tp_alloc`). Support for ARC objects in C structs wasn't added until macOS 10.14 /  Xcode 10. We support compiling on macOS 10.12.\n\nAdditionally, even if we changed our minimum macOS to 10.14, we would need to ensure that `tp_alloc` guarantees zero-filled memory to be compatible with the Xcode 10 feature.\n\nIn the meantime, we will have to use an `__unsafe_unretained` attribute on the objects in our C structs, and manually retain/release them.\n\n### Proposed fix\n\n_No response_","author":{"url":"https://github.com/iccir","@type":"Person","name":"iccir"},"datePublished":"2026-05-31T17:58:04.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":1},"url":"https://github.com/31797/matplotlib/issues/31797"}