When to use -retainCount?

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You should never use -retainCount, because it never tells you anything useful. The implementation of the Foundation and AppKit/UIKit frameworks is opaque; you don’t know what’s being retained, why it’s being retained, who’s retaining it, when it was retained, and so on.

For example:

  • You’d think that [NSNumber numberWithInt:1] would have a retainCount of 1. It doesn’t. It’s 2.
  • You’d think that @"Foo" would have a retainCount of 1. It doesn’t. It’s 1152921504606846975.
  • You’d think that [NSString stringWithString:@"Foo"] would have a retainCount of 1. It doesn’t. Again, it’s 1152921504606846975.

Basically, since anything can retain an object (and therefore alter its retainCount), and since you don’t have the source to most of the code that runs an application, an object’s retainCount is meaningless.

If you’re trying to track down why an object isn’t getting deallocated, use the Leaks tool in Instruments. If you’re trying to track down why an object was deallocated too soon, use the Zombies tool in Instruments.

But don’t use -retainCount. It’s a truly worthless method.

edit

Please everyone go to http://bugreport.apple.com and request that -retainCount be deprecated. The more people that ask for it, the better.

edit #2

As an update,[NSNumber numberWithInt:1] now has a retainCount of 9223372036854775807. If your code was expecting it to be 2, your code has now broken.

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