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POWhat is your preferred coding style for dealloc in Objective-C?
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  1. POWhat is your preferred coding style for dealloc in Objective-C?
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    copied!<p>I know that discussions about coding styles tend to end in disaster and endless flame wars, but that’s not what I want to reach. During the last decade I mainly saw two different coding styles for <code>dealloc</code> methods in Objective-C. The first and most common one was to place <code>dealloc</code> at the bottom of the file. This is also the style Apple uses in the Xcode default templates. The logic behind this seems to be that <code>dealloc</code> is invoked when the end of the object approaches, so the end of the file seems to be a nice metaphor.</p> <p>On the other hand a couple of people tend to put <code>dealloc</code> directly below the <code>@synthesize</code> directives. This has two major disadvantages in my opinion:</p> <ol> <li>The top of the file gets cluttered with <em>boring code</em>.</li> <li>It’s harder to find the essential parts in your class, you have to scroll down.</li> </ol> <p>The huge advantage in my opinion is that you have a direct visual connection between properties and the corresponding <code>release</code> message.</p> <p>The other thing is niling already released variables. While I don’t think that this is necessary, especially in object context where the whole variable gets desctructed after <code>dealloc</code> ends, I tend to also nil the variables. I’m used to do this for variables in function scope, so I’m just consistent with my coding style.</p> <p>This is how most of my classes look like:</p> <pre><code>@implementation Bar @synthesize foo; - (void)dealloc { [foo release], foo = nil; [super dealloc]; } // Initializers and other methods… </code></pre> <p>I already mentioned a couple of pros and cons. What do you think about this topic? What is the coding style you use in <code>dealloc</code> and <em>why</em>? Are there other pros and cons I forgot to mention?</p> <p>I don’t want to start a flame war here. I just want to know what style you use and if you have specific reasons for this or if this doesn’t matter for you in the end.</p>
 

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