The mechanics of Objective-C ARC are the same as anything else. The only difference is the addition of autorelease: you need to insert an extra opAutorelease call when returning an autoreleased object, and an extra opInc call when receiving one in the caller. For autoreleased object references passed to a function by a pointer or by 'ref', add an opAutorelease before the call, and an opInc after. That's it. Then let the optimizer do elision as usual: opAutorelease counts as an opDec with the only difference being that it cannot be elided.