Re: Stale Objective-C object pointer detection

FROM : Bill Bumgarner
DATE : Sun Apr 13 23:48:45 2008

On Apr 13, 2008, at 3:35 PM, Alex Curylo wrote:
> OK, then, what would an equivalently useful value to set a released 
> Objective-C object pointer/ivar to in order to cause any subsequent 
> access of it to stop the program immediately? 0xDEADBEEF perhaps?


Well.. you could do what Greg said and go all NSZombie on it, but you 
have to remember to do that and stuff.

If you want a total hack, just assign (id) 0x1 to any variable that 
really ought to never be used again or better be initialized before 
being used again.

If you want to get terribly fancy, you could create your own root 
class that implements (on Leopard) -resolveInstanceMethod: / 
+resolveClassMethod: and logs, then crashes.

I wrote up some messaging hints here:

http://www.friday.com/bbum/2008/01/01/objective-c-a-hack-to-log-all-methods/
http://www.friday.com/bbum/2008/01/02/objective-c-logging-messages-to-nil/

b.bum