In fact, relinquishing ownership of the connection during this
method is simply a bug. If you're its owner, you're responsible for
preventing it from being deallocated while it's still alive -- and
it's still alive.
In this case, you're pretty sure that autoreleasing it keeps it from
being deallocated long enough for its lifetime to end, but that's
not a safe general assumption. What if the object you're releasing
has a pending error message it's going to display after a timer
expires (i.e. after the autorelease pool has been drained)?
I think it’s a pretty sane assumption that the delegating *may* still
access its reserved memory after the delegate method returns. If the
delegating object has to execute further code in a future run loop
cycle, then it’s the object’s responsibility to ensure it’s still
alive. After all, it told its delegate that it had finished.
Also, I’d consider any implementation that doesn’t invalidate any
pending timers when deallocating/finalizing previously created flawed.
So, in such cases, you have an object lifetime issue that must be
solved on a case by case basis. Sometimes -- maybe most times --
autoreleasing might be an answer, but I don't think that
recommending the use of 'autorelease' over 'release' *as a routine
safety precaution* is a viable position to take.
Well, is there any disadvantage when autoreleasing? (I’m not talking
about tight loops here – that’s another topic.) Generally speaking,
releasing a delegating object, when it notifies its delegate that it’s
finished, should be fine from the delegate’s point of view.
Also, I’m interested what method of reference releasing you’d
recommend, because the timer issue mentioned above would be equally
present when releasing instead of autoreleasing.
Note that I don’t want to persuade you, I just don’t see any
disadvantage of autoreleasing while I do see a slight advantage.
– Georg
_______________________________________________
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
