Re: Use of Mac OS X 10.5 / Leopards Garbage Collection Considered Harmful

FROM : Michael Tsai
DATE : Wed Feb 06 16:12:43 2008

On Feb 6, 2008, at 4:39 AM, John Engelhart wrote:

> Read the above, "object" is synonymous for "struct".  The "layout" 
> of an object is identical to the "layout" of a struct.



That is true but irrelevant. What matters for garbage collection is 
whether the variables are typed as objects at compile time, because 
that's what determines what code the compiler emits for assignments.

> - (const char *)UTF8String;    // Convenience to return null-
> terminated UTF8 representation
>
> Since the pointer that UTF8String returns is provably from 
> NSAllocateCollectable, this prototype has /DISCARDED/ the type 
> qualifier of __strong.


The API does not promise that -UTF8String returns a collectable 
pointer. The current implementation may do so, but the documentation 
says that you should copy the C string if you want to store it.

--Michael