Is it leaking or not?
Catching memory leaks on the ARC compiler can be a daunting task. Even if the destructor of an object instance is called, that still does not mean your object is completely released. In the classic desktop compiler, a quick test to see whether some object instance was released or not was to add a breakpoint (or some logging code) into the destructor, and if you got there, all was good. This is not the case with the ARC compiler. The last method called in the object instance lifecycle after which all instance memory will be completely released is TObject.FreeInstance . While this method is common to both ARC and classic compilers, on the classic compiler executing the destructor would inevitably (unless it throws an uncaught exception) mean executing FreeInstance and completing the release cycle. On the ARC compiler, there is no such guarantee. The destructor can also be called directly via DisposeOf , and FreeInstance will be called only after all strong references to the object a