On 6/2/08 7:47 PM, William Bumgarner said: >So, no, I don't buy for a moment that non-GC is simpler than GC. The >case the OP had is an edge case and, with a bit of thought, becomes >fairly obvious what has gone wrong; the object is being collected >because nothing is referring to it. Note that the application did not >crash, as would be typical in the non-GC case. Given that the OP had >to be manually loading a NIB in the first place in a context that is >both not the main NIB file and not in a document based application, said >NIB loading pattern is definitely moving outside of the realm of rank >beginner. > > *SNIP* > >Reference counting based development is an anachronism within Cocoa >programming. A very important, very well supported, anachronism. >Reference counting will be around for a long long time to come, >certainly, but there is absolutely no reason to use reference counted >based Cocoa development save for legacy reasons and a handful of project >types that really really need the absolute and total determinism of a >reference counted system (of which, "when -dealloc is executed" should >not be a consideration). There are actually a number of very solid >performance and maintainability reasons to avoid retain/release/autorelease.
I prefer GC too, but, for beginners especially, one problem with GC is tools support and documentation. For example, the excellent TN2124 "Mac OS X Debugging Magic" does not even contain the word "garbage". Browse through NSDebug.h: not a word there either. Malloc Debug.app spews an unhelpful error when used with GC apps (it doesn't support them, though happily Instruments does). OTOH, the ref counting model has tonnes of helpful debugging aids and docs. -- ____________________________________________________________ Sean McBride, B. Eng [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rogue Research www.rogue-research.com Mac Software Developer Montréal, Québec, Canada _______________________________________________ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
