I’m reading up on the leak-finding tools for iPhone development and intentionally inserting and looking for memory leaks in my small program before I get into a bigger, harder-to-debug project.
It’s no problem to identify a memory leak that, say, occurs in a regularly invoked method like responding to a touch event. The leak instrument will eventually identify virtual memory that is unclaimed.
I’m more worried about a leak in code for exiting the entire system. Once I completely exit my app, is it a concern that something wasn’t deallocated, or does iphone OS automatically reclaim all user mem at that point?
This issue is unclear to me after reading quite a bit of documentation, and without knowing anything else, I assume it must work like other OS’s in that regard and just take back all user space. If that’s so, won’t I be fine cleaning up regular leaks so my app can run for any amount of time with bounded memory, then not worry so much that everything gets freed up at exit?
Also, if it is critical to free everything before exiting because it will not be reclaimed by the OS, is there a good way to keep my app alive in the instruments after exit for inspection? When I press the home button in the simulator or on the device haven’t I already lost the chance to detect exit-time leaks?
Yes, ending your program will release every bit of memory held by it. Anything otherwise is an OS bug, and you’re unlikely to find that occurring.
EDIT: I bet your asking this because documentation says “iPhone doesn’t support garbage collection.” That statement, however, doesn’t apply to freeing memory when a program ends. It’s only talking about how you have to handle freeing your own memory while your program is running.