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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T10:52:44+00:00

Let’s say I want to create new objects than exist throughout the duration of

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Let’s say I want to create new objects than exist throughout the duration of the program. I need them to be created at startup and continuously run background tasks throughout the program. If I put them in the application’s delegate under applicationDidFinishLaunching, do the objects exist throughout the duration of the program or just the scope of applicationDidFinishLaunching? After applicationDidFinishLaunching returns, do my objects go out of scope or do they keep running background tasks? If so, how do I ensure the objects exist throughout the duration of the program and continue to run background tasks?

The “background tasks” are being run on separate threads. I am using Objective-C with Xcode 3.2.6 on Mac OS X Snowleopard.

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  1. Editorial Team

    The lifetime of Objective-C objects is controlled manually (assuming you’re not using garbage collection or ARC). You shouldn’t ask if they exist throughout the duration of the program—instead, you should make sure that each reference to an object, no matter where it is (main thread, background thread) is properly retained. See the basic memory management rules.

    Specifically, if you create an object with [[MyClass alloc] init], you now have an owning reference to that object (that you are responsible for eventually releasing). If you then start a new thread and give that thread a reference to your object, that thread should call [obj retain] to ensure that the object will continue to exist, and [obj release] when it’s done with the object.

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