Swift Classes — Deinitializers and How Swift Cleans Up After Itself 🧹

Short summary

A beginner-friendly explanation of Swift's Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) and deinitializers. Classes use a hidden reference counter that increments on each new reference and decrements when references disappear; when it hits zero, Swift calls deinit automatically. Unlike init, deinit takes no parameters and cannot be called manually. The article includes code examples with anime-themed class instances to illustrate the lifecycle.

• •ARC tracks a hidden reference count per class instance — when it hits zero, the instance is destroyed
• •deinit runs automatically when the last reference disappears, cannot be called manually
• •Structs don't need ARC because each copy is independent data

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