In which situations do we need to write the __autoreleasing ownership qualifier under ARC?

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You’re right. As the official documentation explains:

__autoreleasing to denote arguments that are passed by reference (id *) and are autoreleased on return.

All of this is very well explained in the ARC transition guide.

In your NSError example, the declaration means __strong, implicitly:

NSError * e = nil;

Will be transformed to:

NSError * __strong error = nil;

When you call your save method:

- ( BOOL )save: ( NSError * __autoreleasing * );

The compiler will then have to create a temporary variable, set at __autoreleasing. So:

NSError * error = nil;
[ database save: &error ];

Will be transformed to:

NSError * __strong error = nil;
NSError * __autoreleasing tmpError = error;
[ database save: &tmpError ];
error = tmpError;

You may avoid this by declaring the error object as __autoreleasing, directly.

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