Why is autorelease especially dangerous/expensive for iPhone applications?

Posted by e.James on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by e.James
Published on 2009-03-05T04:37:06Z Indexed on 2011/01/06 20:54 UTC
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Filed under:

iphone

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objective-c

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Performance

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autorelease

I'm looking for a primary source (or a really good explanation) to back up the claim that the use of autorelease is dangerous or overly expensive when writing software for the iPhone.

Several developers make this claim, and I have even heard that Apple does not recommend it, but I have not been able to turn up any concrete sources to back it up.

SO references:
autorelease-iphone
Why does this create a memory leak (iPhone)?

Note: I can see, from a conceptual point of view, that autorelease is slightly more expensive than a simple call to release, but I don't think that small penalty is enough to make Apple recommend against it.

What's the real story?

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