macOS Garbage - to collect or not to collect?

[CaptSaltyJack]

I'm just curious, and decided to run a poll on how many developers turn on garbage collection in Xcode, and how many leave it off.

Vote please, and also feel free to discuss the pros/cons, and if it makes life much easier for you or not, and any noticeable impact you've seen on your apps.

 

[laprej]

I do use GC and feel it allowed me to prototype something (non-professional) quickly. I had to write a discrete event simulator in Objective-C, pass network packets back and forth between wireless nodes, use NSInvocations for delayed messages, etc. If I had to maintain proper retain counts along the way, I feel my time to develop this software would have doubled or more. My time is better spent ensuring proper protocol behavior than chasing down places where I should/should not have retained.

 

[foidulus]

You still pretty much have to unless you are developing Leopard only apps. GC isn't supported on Tiger or iPhone, so nice to get into the retain release habit.

 

[ManWithhat]

It's more efficient to manually garbage collect, which is one of the reasons C++ is faster than C#/Java (Java has its own issues). Anyways, it's a good habit to get into and generally not that difficult to do if you're following a proper Object-Oriented programming style.

 

[Catfish_Man]

I wish I could turn it on, but I can't. Converting a >250,000 line application built pre-GC and with tons of crosstalk with various cross platform C libraries to use GC? Not fun. Maybe not even possible to do without breaking tons of stuff.

 

[Alloye]

I'm using it for new code but probably won't bother to go back and convert some of my old stuff.

 

[Mac Player]

NEVAH!!!!! It's so easy to manage memory in Objective-C why should i waste cycles with a GC that has so many twists?

 

[LtRammstein]

I believe it depends on what the code's purpose is for.

I personally believe manually handling it is better. It allows you to think outside the box when it comes to problems that you run into during compile/writing.

Garbage Collection is nice, but I feel if we leave basic memory management knowledge to be automated, we'll be under mountains of pointers pointing to nothing.