Question

I have been looking through the questions asked on StackOverflow, but there are so many about memory management in Objective-C that I couldn’t find the answer I was looking for.

The question is if it is ok (and recommnded) to call autorelease before adding a newly created object to a collection (like NSMutableArray)? Or should I release it explicitly after adding it. (I know NSMutableArray willl retain the object)

This illustrates my question:

Scenario A (autorelease):

- (void) add {
   // array is an instance of NSMutableArray

   MyClass *obj = [[[MyClass alloc] init] autorelease];

   [array addObject:obj];
}

Scenario B (explicit release):

- (void) add {
   // array is an instance of NSMutableArray

   MyClass *obj = [[MyClass alloc] init];

   [array addObject:obj];

   [obj release];
}

I assume both are correct, but I am not sure, and I sure don’t know what the preffered way is.

Can the Objective-C gurus shed some light on this?

Answer 1

Both are correct and will work as you’re expecting them to.

I personally prefer to use the latter method, but only because I like to be explicit about when objects get released. By autoreleasing the object, all we’re doing is saying “this object will get released at some arbitrary point in the future.” That means you can put the autoreleased object into the array, destroy the array, and the object might (probably) still exist.

With the latter method, the object would get destroyed immediately with the array (providing that nothing else has come along and retained it in the meantime). If I’m in a memory-constrained environment (say, the iPhone) where I need to be careful about how much memory I’m using, I’ll use the latter method just so I don’t have so many objects lingering in an NSAutoreleasePool somewhere. If memory usage isn’t a big concern for you (and it usually isn’t for me, either), then either method is totally acceptable.