Does @”some text” give an autoreleased or retain 1 object back?

by

The NSString literal notation @"" gives you compile-time constant strings that reside in their own memory space and have constant addresses.

Contrary to popular belief, the reason why you don’t release literal strings is not because they are part of the autorelease pool. They aren’t — instead, they spend the entire application’s lifetime in that same memory space they’re allocated at compile time, and never get deallocated at runtime. They’re only removed when the app process dies.

That said, the only time you need to memory-manage constant NSStrings is when you retain or copy them for yourself. In that case, you should release your retained or copied pointers, just like you do any other object.

Another thing: it’s the literals themselves that don’t need memory management. But if you pass them as arguments to NSString‘s convenience methods or initializers, like you do with stringWithFormat:, then it’s those objects returned by the methods and initializers that follow all memory management rules normally.

More Related Contents:

  1. When to use -retainCount?
  2. Why is @autoreleasepool still needed with ARC?
  3. Retain cycle on `self` with blocks
  4. Why would you use an ivar?
  5. Class methods which create new instances
  6. How does the NSAutoreleasePool autorelease pool work?
  7. Weak NSString variable is not nil after setting the only strong reference to nil
  8. In which situations do we need to write the __autoreleasing ownership qualifier under ARC?
  9. How to find the cause of a malloc “double free” error?
  10. Why has NSNumber such strange retainCounts?
  11. How is release handled for @synthesized retain properties?
  12. With ARC, what’s better: alloc or autorelease initializers?
  13. Tagged pointers in Objective-C
  14. What is the cost of using autorelease in Cocoa?
  15. What increases an object’s retain count?
  16. What is the difference between a __weak and a __block reference?
  17. Get the current first responder without using a private API
  18. What are the new documentation commands available in Xcode 5? [closed]
  19. String comparison in Objective-C
  20. Converting RGB data into a bitmap in Objective-C++ Cocoa
  21. Generate a random alphanumeric string in Cocoa
  22. Avoiding “NSArray was mutated while being enumerated”
  23. Convert milliseconds to NSDate
  24. Compiler error “expected method not found” when using subscript on NSArray
  25. Get the type of a file in Cocoa
  26. Animate infinite scrolling of an image in a seamless loop
  27. Current view controller from AppDelegate?
  28. Best way to make NSRunLoop wait for a flag to be set?
  29. Making some code only run once
  30. Simple Delegate Example?

Leave a Comment