Fresh out of Apple’s WWDC 2011, several developers blogged their excitement about a sweet new iOS 5 feature: automatic garbage collection.

It turns out that garbage collection won’t be automatic, but rather, the SDK will feature a compiler-level feature called Automatic Reference Counting, which at the very least, will make memory management much easier for iOS developers by automatically inserting retain and release commands.

So while not officially automatically collecting garbage for memory, it still is very good news and will remove one of the biggest headaches for iOS/Cocoa Touch development. See the notice for “Automatic Reference Counting” on Apple’s iOS5 for Developers page.

Being new to iOS development myself, I’m also personally excited by “Storyboards” and the new version of “Instruments” in XCode.