On Mar 3, 2009, at 12:50, Nick Zitzmann wrote:
On Mar 3, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Quincey Morris wrote:
I don't know of any documented API contract that says [NSMenu
initWithTitle:] never fails, so checking the returned value seems
prudent.
In the case of Apple's documentation, it's the other way around.
Unless the documentation mentions that it may return nil, it's
guaranteed to return something.
Yet even *that* would need to be documented. Otherwise, as an API
contract, it isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.
In addition, I've always assumed that 'alloc' could potentially
return nil. In that case, the result of the initialization would be
nil too, and so needs to be checked. (Is that wrong? Is an
exception thrown if there is no memory available? If so, is that
documented somewhere?)
It doesn't seem to be documented, but I think it will return nil
only if (1) there was not enough contiguous RAM in the program's VM
space to allocate the object, or (2) there was, but the user has run
out of disk space for swap files. But if this happens, the program
is pretty much screwed anyway, because it's going to crash.
Yes, I'm aware of the "is pretty much screwed" scenario, but I think
there are in fact some recoverable scenarios. One involves a sequence
of very large (valid) allocations gobbling up VM space so that it
becomes impossible to create a humbler NS... object of some kind. If
the application doesn't crash right away, returning nil (or NO) back
through the sequence could release all the memory and allow the
application to continue with an error message.
Another scenario is a memory-limited environment like the iPhone.
_______________________________________________
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 arch...@mail-archive.com
