Should IBOutlets be strong or weak under ARC?

Question

I am developing exclusively for iOS 5 using ARC. Should IBOutlets to UIViews (and subclasses) be strong or weak?

Answer 1

IBOutlet should be strong, for performance reason. See Storyboard Reference, Strong IBOutlet, Scene Dock in iOS 9

As explained in this paragraph, the outlets to subviews of the view controller’s view can be weak, because these subviews are already owned by the top-level object of the nib file. However, when an Outlet is defined as a weak pointer and the pointer is set, ARC calls the runtime function:

id objc_storeWeak(id *object, id value);

This adds the pointer (object) to a table using the object value as a key. This table is referred to as the weak table. ARC uses this table to store all the weak pointers of your application. Now, when the object value is deallocated, ARC will iterate over the weak table and set the weak reference to nil. Alternatively, ARC can call:

void objc_destroyWeak(id * object)

Then, the object is unregistered and objc_destroyWeak calls again:

objc_storeWeak(id *object, nil)

This book-keeping associated with a weak reference can take 2–3 times longer over the release of a strong reference. So, a weak reference introduces an overhead for the runtime that you can avoid by simply defining outlets as strong.

As of Xcode 7, it suggests strong

If you watch WWDC 2015 session 407 Implementing UI Designs in Interface Builder, it suggests (transcript from http://asciiwwdc.com/2015/sessions/407)

And the last option I want to point out is the storage type, which can either be strong or weak.

In general you should make your outlet strong, especially if you are connecting an outlet to a sub view or to a constraint that's not always going to be retained by the view hierarchy.

The only time you really need to make an outlet weak is if you have a custom view that references something back up the view hierarchy and in general that's not recommended.

So I'm going to choose strong and I will click connect which will generate my outlet.