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On Aug 9, 2017, at 3:01 AM, Alastair Houghton <alastair@alastairs-place.net> wrote:

On 8 Aug 2017, at 17:38, Doug Hill <cocoadev@breaqz.com> 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)

+new requires no extra message. It's just a shorthand for [[SomeClassname alloc] init]

- 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)

Some say that it's far more confusing and hard to read the alloc/init syntax.

- 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)

There has never been an issue with this. +new saves you some typing for one syntax but has no impact on anything else.

- 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.

With ARC, autorelease behavior is essentially hidden from the developer and doesn't really matter any more. Again, +new is unrelated to all the other class methods. Doug Hill _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com