Sunday, April 8, 2012

What"s the difference between sending -release or -drain to an Autorelease Pool?


In many Books and on many Sites I see -drain. Well, for an Autorelease Pool that sounds cool. But does it do anything other than an release? I would guess -drain just makes the Pool to -release all it's objects, without releasing the Pool itself. Just a guess.



Source: Tips4all

3 comments:

  1. Note that the comments on oxigen's answer saying that -drain does not release the NSAutoreleasePool are not correct. The documentation for NSAutoreleasePool clearly says that -drain releases (and thus destroys) the NSAutoreleasePool.

    -drain is a replacement for using -release for NSAutoreleasePool objects, the only difference being that provides a hint to the garbage collection system.

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  2. Oxigen is right, see the documentation for method drain of NSAutoreleasePool:


    In a reference-counted environment,
    releases and pops the receiver; in a
    garbage-collected environment,
    triggers garbage collection if the
    memory allocated since the last
    collection is greater than the current
    threshold.

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  3. If your system has a garbage Collection, then -drain send message (objc_collect_if_needed) for GC

    If you haven't GC, then drain = release

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