Question

In C, something like the following would be a disaster (ie, a memory leak) because you’re returning a pointer to memory that you will never be able to free:

NSString* foo() {   return [NSString stringWithFormat:@'%i+%i=%i', 2, 2, 2+2]; } 

Is that in fact totally fine in Objective-C since the memory that the returned pointer points to will be autoreleased? Even if it is OK, is it frowned upon for any reason? Any reason to prefer the C style, as below?

void foo(NSString ** modifyMe) {   *modifyMe = [NSString stringWithFormat:@'%i+%i=%i', 2, 2, 2+2]; } 

Answer 1

Functions in Cocoa obey the same memory management rules as everything else in Cocoa. Your first example is perfectly fine.