On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 4:27 PM, James Gregurich<bayoubenga...@mac.com> wrote: > ok. What percentage of cocoa classes will exhibit the behavior you describe? > I've never seen an objc class that mysteriously hangs around beyond the > destruction of its dependencies (including any autorelease pools that contain > it). I wouldn't be shocked if there were some....maybe some system singletons?
100% might. Maybe 0% today, and then tomorrow Apple might release an update that causes all objects to hang around forever. You don't know, and you shouldn't care. > If 90% of objc classes are completely deterministic in their life cycle > behavior with retain/release and 10% aren't, I'll not use the 10% to make the > case that I should introduce even more entropy into my system by using > garbage collection. If this is your attitude you're unprepared for the reality of modern software development. And I suggest you never touch NSFont, NSColor, NSWindow, or NSMenu; they might stick around longer than you intended! > GC isn't nirvana. it does have its perils and issues, and you have to be > aware of them and code around them. You can't just turn it on and some how > everything magically works. There is no perfect solution to memory > management. I prefer a solution where I manage the dependencies and objects > go away in an orderly fashion based on the dependency graph for those objects. Then Cocoa's obviously not your cup of tea. > additionally, I find the notion of adding an extra subsystem that > periodically scans memory looking for pointers to be foolhardy. my code > already knows what needs to be cleaned up and when. I don't need a system > sitting in the background scanning memory trying to clean up behind me. All > I need is a mechanism to do the cleanup in a maintainable and extensible > manner. "My code already knows how it's going to use its memory; why should we have some stupid little chip -- watchyacallit, an MMU? -- to do that for me?" The creators of garbage collectors don't consider them to be panaceas. There are a very well known class of problems which GC utterly fails in. There's also a rather large class of problems which can only be solved (that is, solved by a programmer within a normal human lifespan) with some form of automatic garbage collection. The Lisp guys can probably come up with boatloads; after all, they've had since the late 50's. --Kyle Sluder _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
