Hi guys, I just implemented the -initWithBytesNoCopy:length:deallocator: initialiser for NSData and NSMutableData (this appeared in OS X 10.9). This takes a block as the last argument which allows you to customise how memory will be deallocated. This is very useful when you have a memory buffer whose lifetime is tied to some other resource that you want to discard once the NSData is no longer needed.
Unfortunately this required adding an ivar to hold the block, so there is a slight complication: To maintain strict binary compatibility, NSDataMalloc and NSMutableDataMalloc instances will deallocate themselves if called with this initialiser and return a new object of the correct subclass instead. This could be avoided if we added the block ivar to NSDataMalloc and NSMutableDataMalloc directly, but that’d break any consumers subclassing these classes (assuming the fragile ABI). Now I am of the opinion that since NSData is a class cluster, nobody should have any business subclassing these anyways, but I wanted to solicit some input on the issue before making this kind of change: Would it be acceptable to make this a common ivar? Should we bump the minor version to indicate that this might be a breaking change or do we regard the internal organisation of the class cluster as an implementation detail that we can change on a whim? Thanks, Niels
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