retaincount – Make Me Engineer

Calling -retainCount Considered Harmful

June 11, 2022 by Tarik

The basics: What are the official reasons to not use retainCount? Autorelease management is the most obvious — you have no way to be sure how many of the references represented by the retainCount are in a local or external (on a secondary thread, or in another thread’s local pool) autorelease pool. Also, some people … Read more

When to use -retainCount?

April 25, 2022 by Tarik

You should never use -retainCount, because it never tells you anything useful. The implementation of the Foundation and AppKit/UIKit frameworks is opaque; you don’t know what’s being retained, why it’s being retained, who’s retaining it, when it was retained, and so on. For example: You’d think that [NSNumber numberWithInt:1] would have a retainCount of 1. … Read more