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Please, don’t misunderstand the question. I know that implementation of the pointers in these two languages is identical, as C is a subset of Objective C.
My question is about the actual use of pointers in real code. Are best practices different? What is done differently and why? What should I keep in mind when I learn about pointer usage in C, if I actually want to use that knowledge in Objective C environment?
Pointers in objective-c are really used for a subset of what they’re used for in C: Passing around references to objects, and returning by reference. Occasionally, you’ll find methods which take function pointers accepted as arguments, and void* pointers are sometimes used to provide context in callbacks, although both of these are gradually being replaced by blocks.
Unlike in C, they are generally not used to reference arrays or strings, or as iterators. You’ll generally not use pointers in memory management (malloc/free, etc.) as this is all handled by the system frameworks.
Edit:
You can find an function pointer & block-based methods accomplishing the same task in NSArray’s sortedArrayUsingFunction:context: and sortedArrayUsingComparator:. The same basic principle applies to callbacks — compare Mike Ash’s block-based KVO methods to Cocoa’s built-in ones.