Question

I haven’t much experience with objective-c language. i am quite confuse with memory management in objective C.I know that memory management is very important factor so we have to strongly focus on that while developing.

My Question is that which basic things we have to follow to reduce the uses of memory as much as possible?

Answer 1

This is a very good question to ask, because in Objective-C there is no garbage collector. We have to manually handle the memory.

You own an object in Objective-C when you alloc it, copy it or new it. For example (I’ve copied this example code from http://interfacelab.com/objective-c-memory-management-for-lazy-people/):

    -(void)someMethod
{
  // I own this!
  SomeObject *iOwnThis = [[SomeObject alloc] init];

  [iOwnThis doYourThing];

  // I release this!
  [iOwnThis release];
}

-(void)someOtherMethod:(SomeObject *)someThing
{
  // I own this too!
  SomeObject *aCopyOfSomeThing = [someThing copy];

  [aCopyOfSomeThing doSomething];

  // I release this!
  [aCopyOfSomeThing release];
}

-(void)yetAnotherMethod
{
  // I own this too!
  SomeObject *anotherThingIOwn = [SomeObject new];

  [anotherThingIOwn doSomething];

  // I release this!
  [anotherThingIOwn release];
}