Or if you want to store NSInvocation objects long-term, or if you need low latency processing, or if you want to be able to safely take the address of a global variable, or use the bytes pointer of a temporary NSData object without jumping through hoops, or....GC can be nice, but there are a *ton* of reasons why someone might not want to use it. Mike
I think it's safe to say that if someone is questioning the mechanics of memory management then any of the above wouldn't necessarily apply to them. Garbage Collection, while particularly useful for certain highly complicated scenarios (avoiding retain cycles in threaded code, etc) it's existence presents a different path into Cocoa than many who have been using the frameworks for several years are used to. I would venture to say that all of us learned Cocoa the Hillegass way, wherein memory management was a fundamental requirement for moving forward. With GC, the implications of memory management aren't necessarily a requirement for authoring your first trivial-but-not-quite-hello-world application. It pushed memory management into a position akin to any other ancillary of Cocoa - NSDictionary for instance. Yes, at some point you are very likely going to need to care about it but not until you have other aspects of language nailed down as well as a somewhat deeper appreciation for the design patterns present in the frameworks. If anything, I would assert that an understanding of MVC is a more important part of a potential Cocoa developer's initiation into our little word than how memory management works in Cocoa.
-rob.
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