Re: Is "-init" really needed?
Re: Is "-init" really needed?
- Subject: Re: Is "-init" really needed?
- From: Alastair Houghton <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 11:01:53 +0100
On 8 Aug 2017, at 17:38, Doug Hill <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> As others have mentioned, I too have never seen any evidence or statements
> from Apple that discourages +new or -init.
I suspect it was ObjC programmers themselves rather than Apple/NeXT that
discouraged it. As for why, well I can imagine a few reasons:
- Performance - it incurs an extra message send (which would have been an issue
back in the day)
- Clarity - [[… alloc] init] shows clearly that it’s a two step operation (some
classes support being *re*-initialized, so you can call initialisers more than
once; other classes don’t actually need initialising)
- If +new was the way to go, you’d need variants of +new for each variant of
-init (or you have to use [[… alloc] init] anyway)
- The fact that convenience constructors were often written naming the object,
e.g. [NSString stringWithFormat:…], [NSArray array]. +new would duplicate
that, but isn’t as nice to read or look at. OK, +new doesn’t autorelease, but
still.
Kind regards,
Alastair.
--
http://alastairs-place.net
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