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macOS Weak property attribute

Cromulent

Cromulent

macrumors 604
Original poster
Oct 2, 2006
6,802
1,096
The Land of Hope and Glory
I get that the strong property is equivalent to retain as per this section of the documentation:

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/AutomaticReferenceCounting.html#ownership.spelling.property

but what is weak used for? It says that assign is equivalent to __unsafe_unretained ownership and that weak is equivalent to __weak ownership but I'm not sure I get the difference between weak and assign. Both seem to do the same thing in that neither of them specify that the object that contains the property owns the property object.

Can someone shed some light on this please?
 
G

Guiyon

macrumors 6502a
Mar 19, 2008
771
4
Cambridge, MA
IIRC, in 10.6/iOS 4.0 the two keywords are identical. In 10.7/iOS 5 (or 10.5 and up if using garbage collection) and up, __weak pointers are auto-zeroed when the object they are pointing to is deallocated. It's one of the keywords I loved when developing for Mac OS X and really missed when I started doing heavy iOS work. It really helps to cut down on dangling pointer-related bugs.

In a nutshell:
__unsafe_unretained - Simple assign, ARC doesn't do anything with it
__weak - Assign with auto-zeroing on deallocation
 
Cromulent

Cromulent

macrumors 604
Original poster
Oct 2, 2006
6,802
1,096
The Land of Hope and Glory
Guiyon said:
IIRC, in 10.6/iOS 4.0 the two keywords are identical. In 10.7/iOS 5 (or 10.5 and up if using garbage collection) and up, __weak pointers are auto-zeroed when the object they are pointing to is deallocated. It's one of the keywords I loved when developing for Mac OS X and really missed when I started doing heavy iOS work. It really helps to cut down on dangling pointer-related bugs.

In a nutshell:
__unsafe_unretained - Simple assign, ARC doesn't do anything with it
__weak - Assign with auto-zeroing on deallocation
Click to expand...

Ah, fantastic. Thanks for the info.
 
jared_kipe

jared_kipe

macrumors 68030
Dec 8, 2003
2,967
1
Seattle
Basically __weak's are supposed to become nil if the object they point to becomes stale/dealloc'd.

I really like the ideas behind ARC (automatic reference counting) but I haven't really had a problem with the simple normal reference counting.

EDIT: Oh and I say 'supposed to become nil' because you can target OSX 10.6 and iOS 4.2(or so) and not have the auto zero behavior.
 
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