macOS retaining in 2 lines instead of 3?

bengimizrahi said:

Instead of:

Code:

UIWindow *localPortraitWindow;
localPortraitWindow = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];
self.portraitWindow = localPortraitWindow;

can we do the following?:

Code:

self.portraitWindow = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];
[self.portraitWindow release];

In the second one, [UIWindow alloc] increments reference count by 1;
'self.portraitWindow = ...' increments by 1, too. Finally, [self.portraitWindow release] decrements by 1.

Am I correct?

Click to expand...

i assume you didn't declare the portraitWindow property as "assign?"

.

Let me start of by saying I'm somewhat new to Objective-C, so I don't claim to be an expert. I probably shouldn't be giving out advice yet. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm assuming self.portraitWindow is a property with 'retain' specified. In that case, BOTH #1 and #2 up the reference count when 'self.portraitWindow = ...' is invoked. Not just #2. So if the assumption is correct, then yes, you should call release. But you should be doing it in either case.

If you're really just out to lower your lines of code count, I propose this:

This is not correct. You're implicitly retaining the object with the initWithFrame: method, and again with the assignment to the portraitWindow property. This must be balanced with a release or autorelease.


This is technically correct, but I would consider it bad coding practise to manually release a property in this way. There's nothing wrong with this at all, I just don't like the semantics.


This is what I'd do in most circumstances. The only downside to this is a slight performance penalty involved in autorelease over release, but this is only something worth worrying about if the code is being run hundreds or thousands of times a second (which this particular code obviously isn't).

If I wanted to avoid autorelease, this is what I'd do:

If UIWindow is your own class, the typical Cocoa idiom would be to add a class method to return an instance already autoreleased (a convenience method), and to use that:


If UIWindow is not your own class, use Nutter's third code snippet; autorelease is exactly the right thing to do here.

On that note, I rather wish Apple hadn't allowed a retain attribute on properties. Yes, it makes things simpler in some cases (specifically where you're using a lot of convenience methods returning autoreleased objects), but in cases where classes DON'T have convenience methods, it introduces headaches like this.

Autorelease pools are very fast... I would not worry about overhead from that unless Shark indicates that it's a problem.