[cl-objc-devel] NSAutoreleasePool problem

[Matthias Andreas Benkard]

Hi,

2008/5/7 Jean-Philippe Barette-LaPierre <jpbarrette at gmail.com>:
> It seems that for hello-world example just using:
>
> (defparameter *pool* (invoke (invoke 'ns-autorelease-pool alloc) init))
>
> at the beginning is sufficient.

Yes, that should do the trick.  Memory-management-wise, it's probably
not much better than letting all top-level objects leak, but I'm not
aware of any better way, either.

> objective-cl project seems to have some guidelines for this.

Objective-CL does essentially the same thing as above (albeit very
early on at initialisation time, as should be done; see
Objective-C/libobjcl.m, function objcl_initialise_runtime), but it
also automatically releases objects that are no longer used from the
Lisp side (that is, it integrates the Lisp GC with Objective-C's
reference counting scheme).  Still, if you're writing a console app
using the Foundation framework, you'll need to manage autorelease
pools yourself, just as in Objective-C.  There's no way around that,
as far as I can tell.  On the other hand, if you're writing GUI
applications, AppKit is supposed to manage autorelease pools for you.

For details see:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/MemoryMgmt/Concepts/AutoreleasePools.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000047-SW2

Hope this helps,
Matthias (Objective-CL maintainer)