thank you KiranSarella, that helped!

thank you for clearing that up for me!

Ok, I understand now why the 'temporary' gets a deinit() call before I would like it to. What I still don't get, is why the same thing isn't happening when it is put inside a var, as that var is also no longer being referenced, at what seems to me to be the exact same point in the code. Is this a 'lucky coincidence', aka hidden bug, waiting to come out of hiding when some part of ARC is changed in the compiler? If there is no exact control over the lifetime of an object in swift, how would you go about implementing the C++ concept of RAII in swift?