Re: upper limit on retain count

FROM : Ondra Cada
DATE : Tue Apr 19 20:55:26 2005

Ivan,

On 19.4.2005, at 20:30, Ivan S. Kourtev wrote:

> It's not at all infeasible that the low-level physical description of
> such artifacts contain 1e9 devices, each described by orders of
> magnitude of more objects.  In certain situations one cannot work on
> these things in a hierarchical fashion and one needs to work on them
> "flat," so there can be "a lot" of objects, each with "a lot" of
> connections to others, and each flagged with a myriad of other
> objects.


Well, I fear in that case you *cannot* use ObjC objects for them. 1e9
plus objects means (considerably more than) 7 GB of address space.
Although that is not in principle problem with a G5, currently it *is*
an unsolvable problem with the ObjC runtime (or at the very least the
Cocoa libraries -- see
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/64bit.html for details), which
is and in 10.4 remains 32-bit-based.

On the other hand, I do agree it would be nice if the documentation
explicitly stated that an "overretained" object sticks and there is no
fear of the retain count wrapping through zero.
---
Ondra Èada
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