Re: Beginner with Cocoa

FROM : Scott Thompson
DATE : Mon Mar 24 15:32:40 2008

On Mar 24, 2008, at 7:12 AM, Jeff LaMarche wrote:
> I'g be rather surprised if the Cocoa books took out discussions of 
> traditional objective-C memory managements in their next releases. 
> It's still available for use, and as you mention, necessary for 
> writing to earlier versions of the OS, not to mention for 
> programming that thing that we're allowed to talk about programming 
> for here.


It would not surprise me. There are still a lot of cases where you 
cannot make use of the Garbage Collector.
For example, I would hope that Cocoa development books might discuss 
the Ruby and Python Objective-C bridges.  If you either bridge in your 
application (either to implement an embedded scripting language, or as 
the main implementation language), then you will not be able to use 
the garbage collector.

There are also third party frameworks and libraries that may not yet 
be available in garbage collected versions.  Applications linking to 
those libraries will have to use the traditional memory management 
scheme as well.

Over time, there will be more code able to take advantage of the 
Garbage Collector, but I think it will be some time before it's 
ubiquitous enough to remove the retain/release memory management 
scheme from the literature.

Scott