Home/ Questions/Q 6914227
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-27T09:19:12+00:00

It’s been at least two years since I’ve coded in objective-c, and after pulling

  • 0

It’s been at least two years since I’ve coded in objective-c, and after pulling my boss’s git repo I found several instances of @property (nonatomic, readonly, weak); in the project.

I felt as though google, stackoverflow, or the apple documentation would be able to solve my query in a jiffy, but I can’t for the life of me what the attribute (weak) does.

My two questions are:

  1. What does (weak) mean?
  2. Why is (weak) not being recognized as a valid keyword by my XCode?

I’m on 10.6 still, but my XCode is up to date.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    weak is usable in both Garbage Collection on the desktop, and Automatic Reference Counting on Desktop 10.7+ and iOS 5.0+. It declares that the property is a zeroing weak pointer. In other words, it’s a reference to the object, that does not call retain or release, and is automatically nilled out when the object is destroyed. In order to use such a property correctly, if you’re going to refer to it more than once, you must store it into a local variable before using it, or it may get nilled out unpredictably in the middle of your code.

    • 0