StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>Autorelease just means "this will be released at a later date". If you autorelease something three times, it will be released three times, later.</p> <p>Instead of guessing, read through and understand <a href="http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/cocoa/conceptual/MemoryMgmt/MemoryMgmt.html" rel="nofollow">the Memory Management Programming Guide</a> before you do anything else. It will save you a ton of time and frustration.</p> <hr> <p>You also asked, in the comments to another answer, why people use autorelease to begin with. Autorelease is necessary for a common case where you have to create a new object and return it. By the other rules of memory management, you would need to release the object at some point or it would be leaked, but if you release it before you return it, it will go away immediately.</p> <p>There are two ways that you could deal with this: a) to have these methods return a new object which the caller is expected to release when it is done with the object, and b) to make sure that the object is released as soon as the caller is done with it.</p> <p>The way Cocoa and Cocoa Touch handle this situation by convention is option b): to use autorelease pools, because you won't have to keep track of ownership except for the objects you explicitly create. Some people use autorelease for nearly everything instead of release, and this is a bit more inefficient than release, but more importantly it hides any useful distinctions you might make between release and autorelease when you're trying to read, navigate and understand the code.</p> <p>As I said earlier, please read the Memory Management Programming Guide and all these questions will be answered. Better yet, if you just follow the simple rules listed in there, you won't have to think deep thoughts about every combination; there'll be a general rule to follow for your situation and the rule will work.</p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload