How important is managing memory in Objective-C?

Posted by Alex Mcp on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Alex Mcp
Published on 2010-06-06T03:52:17Z Indexed on 2010/06/06 4:02 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 463

Background: I'm (jumping on the bandwagon and) starting learning about iPhone/iPad development and Objective-C. I have a great background in web development and most of my programming is done in javascript (no libraries), Ruby, and PHP.

Question: I'm learning about allocating and releasing memory in Objective-C, and I see it as quite a tricky task to layer on top of actually getting the farking thing to run. I'm trying to get a sense of applications that are out there and what will happen with a poorly memory-managed program.

A) Are apps usually released with no memory leaks? Is this a feasible goal, or do people more realistically just excise the worst offenders and that's ok?

B) If I make an NSString for a title of a view, let's say, and forget to deallocate it it, does this really only become a problem if I recreate that string repeatedly? I imagine what I'm doing is creating an overhead of the memory needed to store that string, so it's probably quite piddling (a few bytes?) However if I have a rapidly looping cycle in a game that 'leaks' an int every cycle or something, that would overflow the app quite quickly. Are these assumptions correct?

Sorry if this isn't up the community-wiki alley, I'm just trying to get a handle on how to think about memory and how careful I'll need to be. Any anecdotes or App Store-submitted app experiences would be awesome to hear as well.

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about objective-c

Related posts about best-practices