Re: Main window disappears. Sometimes.

FROM : Paul Sargent
DATE : Mon Jun 02 20:35:33 2008

On 2 Jun 2008, at 18:50, Bill Bumgarner wrote:

> While learning the retain/release paradigm is certainly useful, it 
> is considerably more complex than GC.  It is also unnecessary while 
> learning Cocoa.  Specifically, GC is intended to be a production 
> quality solution that you can use in your Cocoa applications, 
> without exception.  In Leopard, there have been a handful of bugs 
> and they have been addressed through software updates -- not 
> surprising given the rather sweeping and intrusive set of changes 
> needed to support GC.  And GC will get better / faster in future 
> releases.


I agree with nearly everything you've said, except the (second half of 
the) first statement.

I wouldn't say retain/release is more complex than GC. I'd say using 
retain/release in a medium->large size project is more complex than 
using GC, but the base concept is a simpler one. Whilst learning, 
getting retain/release wrong tends to be less confusing than getting 
GC wrong. GC will make things disappear at random times, whereas 
retain/release will tend to be deterministic in behaviour.

... and it's good grounding. Learning some of the old styles of 
writing Cocoa apps (e.g. accessor methods before properties, custom 
controllers before bindings) makes learning the newer styles that much 
easier. You don't need to write big projects without the nice new 
technologies. Just do a few test apps with them and understand why you 
want them.

That's how all the senior programmers on this list learnt (although 
they didn't have a choice). Why do we think that people following can 
jump a few steps?

That's my opinion anyway. (Feel free to disagree, but we probably 
don't need another big thread about it)