When you provide both getter and setter, there is often just no need for an instance variable at all, i.e. when you just forward those messages or store data in other places. As soon as one of them is missing, the ivar is needed to synthesize that functionality. If I remember correctly, for readonly properties … Read more
As of clang 3.2 (circa February 2012), “default synthesis” (or “auto property synthesis”) of Objective-C properties is provided by default. It’s essentially as described in the blog post you originally read: http://www.mcubedsw.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/new_objective-c_features/ (except that that post describes the feature as “enabled, then disabled”; I don’t know if that’s an issue with Xcode or if the … Read more
self.myString = @”test”; is exactly equivalent to writing [self setMyString:@”test”];. Both of these are calling a method. You could have written that method yourself. It might look something like this: – (void)setMyString:(NSString*)newString { _myString = newString; } Because you used @synthesize, you don’t have to actually bother writing that method, you can just allow the … Read more
There’s a lot of answers, but also a big confusion. I’ll try to put some order (or increase the mess, we’ll see…) Let’s stop talking about Xcode. Xcode is an IDE. clang is a compiler. This feature we are discussing is called autosynthesis of properties and it’s an Objective-C language extension supported by clang, which … Read more
@synthesize will generate getter and setter methods for your property. @dynamic just tells the compiler that the getter and setter methods are implemented not by the class itself but somewhere else (like the superclass or will be provided at runtime). Uses for @dynamic are e.g. with subclasses of NSManagedObject (CoreData) or when you want to … Read more