Comments on: Cocoa Coding Practice: Old School vs New

By: gumoz

gumoz — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:54:54 +0000

We does not use garbage collection in production code, in fact it is dumb to not release your memory, the garbage collector will not release the memory when you want to get it released. For heavy duty applications GC is not yet an option, and in fact if you want your code to be portable, don’t use GC like for example: porting a class to the iphone. Or maybe porting it to another platform, also it is more difficult to use garbage collector on Core Foundation than standard destruct methods. Garbage Collector is there for neophyte programmers who do not know how to manage memory but have good ideas for new applications, fast prototyping, and heavy leaking applications (written by the neophytes). A good comparison of this kind of discussions search on google (LabView vs C) it is a similar discussion.

for CF reference check: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/GarbageCollection/Articles/gcCoreFoundation.html

By: Matt Long

Matt Long — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:24:48 +0000

Retracted

I misunderstood the context. Sorry about that. -Matt

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:08:24 +0000

On the topic of "garbage collection is the future," I thought I would add something I found in the iPhone SDK samples today:

"Note: iPhone OS does not support memory management using the garbage collection feature that is in Mac OS X v10.5 and later."

So apparently if you develop for the iPhone, garbage collection IS NOT the future.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/gettingstarted/docs/creatingiphoneapps.action;jsessionid=EF636612C9CC3FAD27E747A0C66866C0.worker7

By: mmalc

mmalc — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 05:17:16 +0000

For the longer answer, we have to look at what Objective-C is synthesizing my @property(retain) NSURL *targetURL; into. The resulting setter for this property is something very similar to:

Actually the synthesised code is not similar to that shown. Since you didn't specify nonatomic (as in, @property(nonatomic , retain) NSURL *targetURL;), there will be a lock in there too. (And a retain/autorelease around the get accessor. So invoking the accessor in dealloc would be unnecessarily expensive.

By: nevyn

nevyn — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:29:12 +0000

If [self setVar:nil] crashes but [var release] doesn't, you're doing it wrong. Personally I like using self.var = nil; -- frees the memory, nulls the pointer /and/ the syntax is short and sweet.

Also, saying that you saved two message calls in the destructor doing it your way is perhaps the most preoptimization-y thing I've ever heard.

By: Apple » Cocoa Coding Practice: Old School vs New

Apple » Cocoa Coding Practice: Old School vs New — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:25:58 +0000

[...] Cocoa Is My Girlfriend wrote an interesting post today on Cocoa Coding Practice: Old School vs NewHere’s a quick excerptSince Apple was wise enough to make all of the memory calls no-ops with gc turned on it does not hurt anything to leave them in!… [...]