Question

In this Apple code: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1702/_index.html

I can see that the session allocated at the start of the init method is not released.

Why ? Is there a reason to this ?

Answer 1

A couple possible reasons come to mind:

• Apple meant to convert this sample to ARC, and forgot about or missed the autorelease call later in the same snippet.
• The ivar that gets session at the end of the init method is declared @property (assign), and so they deliberately wanted to keep it retained for now. If I remember right, this is poor practice – they should have autoreleased session and declared the @property (retain).
• They hand-release the session later. Not strictly poor practice, but certainly confusing and hard to read, and may lead to a bug in maintenance later (when someone loses track of the retain–release balance).
• This is genuinely a bug. Good catch!

In any event, you’re right in that it’s somewhat inconsistent with good memory management practices. It’s hard to tell for sure, however, whether there’s a definitive reason it’s not released.