Question

Whenever Apple creates its own custom classes, it often creates a pointer to the object instead of the actual object itself.

For example, instead of doing:

Class object

They often do:

Class *object = [[Class alloc] init];

Why are pointers so commonly used instead of putting the object on the stack? Is there some technical reason for this, because I don’t see any immediate benefit of doing so.

EDIT: If Objective-C doesn’t support objects on the stack how can they create any non-pointers? I mean I have seen people use NSInteger directly.

Answer 1

Objective-C doesn’t support objects on the stack.

Fantastic explanation on Mike Ash’s blog here