I'm having trouble with autoreleased objects not being released when I
expect them to be released.
I'm writing an app that observes ui elements of another app using the
Accessibility API. I get a root ui element from the observed
application and register for the kAXMainWindowChangedNotification.
CFRunLoopAddSource([[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] getCFRunLoop],
AXObserverGetRunLoopSource(observer), kCFRunLoopDefaultMode);
The idea is that when the observed application's main window changes,
my observing app takes special action in response.
So far so good. Here's the weird part: any autoreleased objects I
allocate in my notification handler aren't in fact released until my
observer app gets "tickled" by some event. So if my observer app is
just sitting there in the background logging notifications to the
console, any autoreleased objects created just pile up in the
autorelease pool. Clicking in the observing app's window, or even just
activating it then triggers a massive release festival.
I suppose one explanation is that my run loop is stalled because it
thinks there is nothing to process, but I can't find a straightforward
way to programmatically tell the run loop to iterate. In any case, my
understanding was that this was a detail I needn't worry about,
A hack-around that seems to work: in my notification handler, I
schedule a method for the next run loop iteration (using -[NSObject
performSelector:withObject:afterDelay:]) in which I do all the real
work, but I am puzzled as to why this works.
It seems like there are lots of cases where one might write a
background only app that doesn't receive events but whose autorelease
pools are nevertheless drained at the end of a run loop iteration,
which suggests that run loops really ought to keep iterating when
necessary without any special action on the coder's part.
Perhaps there is a subtlety of run loops that I'm missing. Can someone
clarify this?
_murat
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