Re: Beginner with Cocoa

FROM : colo
DATE : Mon Mar 24 18:43:10 2008

> Reference counting is well established.  Retain/release is not
>  reference counting.
>
>  The essential point of reference counting is that the language system
>  does it for you, you don't have to think about it at all.  Most Java
>  and scripting developers never even learn to think that there are such
>  things as allocation and disposal.  The essential point of plain
>  memory management is that you have to think about it constantly, and
>  that the decision actually to free an object (or the research into why
>  it was freed too early or too late) requires knowledge of the state of
>  the entire system.
>
>  Retain/release is a middle ground: it's not done automatically, you do
>  have to think about it, a bit.  But it's possible to pull it off with
>  very limited thought and very simple constraints.  But that mental
>  model is, so far as I'm aware, utterly unique in language design, and
>  turns out to be startlingly hard to learn, coming in either from a
>  true ref-counting world (whence you have to learn to think about
>  something you never before knew existed), or from vanilla do-it-
>  yerself memory management (whence you have to learn to trust a simple
>  system for something that has always meant life-or-death, sweaty
>  palms, and late night aggravation).


Well I have to say. None of that sounds like any fun what so ever. In
fact it sounds a little anti-constructive with the amount of time it
would take to get anything out the door let alone prototyped to a
beta.