Question

I use properties pretty much anytime my classes need iVars. For retained properties, I have grown accustomed to a specific way of using the accessor methods to alloc/initialize the actual iVars:

- (void)anInitOrAccessorMethod
{
  self.property = [[AClass alloc] init];
  [self.property release];
}

Anytime I need to set a non-autoreleased iVar, I use the above style of setting the property (which retains the object), then sending it a release message to offset the alloc+retain. This is in contrast to many community code examples I see, where people just set the iVars directly if the object is created using alloc/create, thus eliminating the extra release.

Besides the extra code overhead, are there any performance drawbacks to my style?

Answer 1

Do not do that. If your property is declared as having copy semantics, your code will leak the first object and overrelease the second.