Question

With obj-c on the iPhone, is there any harm in autoreleasing everything instead of releasing?

Eg, this code:

NSString *recipe = [[NSString alloc] initWithUTF8String:sqlite3_column_text(dbps,0)];
[arr addObject:recipe];
[recipe release];

Can be shortened to two lines by autoreleasing the recipe nsstring when i create it:

NSString *recipe = [[[NSString alloc] initWithUTF8String:sqlite3_column_text(dbps,0)] autorelease];
[arr addObject:recipe];

Are there any drawbacks to this? I find it suits my coding style better. Thanks all.

Answer 1

The drawback is that the objects get released later. In most cases this won’t be a problem but if you allocate and autorelease thousands of objects in a tight loop this overhead can add up to a point where it impacts performance or even causes your app to run out of memory.

In any case, you might want to use:

[NSString stringWithUTF8String:sqlite3_column_text(dbps,0)];

instead of

[[[NSString alloc] initWithUTF8String:sqlite3_column_text(dbps,0)] autorelease];