On: J2objc - A Java to iOS Objective-C translation too...

[tlrobinson]

"runtime and tool support to detect memory leaks".

So... a garbage collector?

[hoka → tlrobinson]

Well, if it's just detecting, that's not GC. That's just, "Hey! There's trash here!"

[tlrobinson → hoka]

Once you know where the trash is, the easy part is deallocating it.

[invalidname → tlrobinson]

Its not automatic, you need to explicitly release. They are referring to the tools builtin in xcode which you will have to use manually to debug memory problems in Objective-C then move it back to your Java code as annotations.

[upwardbound → tlrobinson]

I think that's referring to "development runtime", not "production runtime". I.e. run a memory leak detector while you are debugging and profiling. But once you fix all/most of the leaks, you don't need to deploy a GC.