Re: NSZombie??

[Jonathan B. Leffert]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 06:09:26AM +0000, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> On Tuesday, March 26, 2002, at 10:39 PM, Jonathan B. Leffert wrote:
> 
> > Does the GNUstep runtime support NSZombies?  I can't find any 
> > references to
> > it in Foundation/NSDebug.h or in the source to NSObject.
> 
> No ... it sets the isa pointer to 0xdeadface so any attempt to send 
> messages to
> the deallocated object (before it is reused) will cause  crash, and the 
> reason
> for the crash is obvious when you look at the object in the debugger.

Actually, I don't believe it causes a crash for access.  It does set the isa
pointer to some other location which has -release implemented to log an
error.

> I do occasionally think about implementing NSZombie ... but it offers 
> very
> little improvement over the existing mechanism, and is not an official 
> part of
> the OpenStep or MacOS-X APIs, so I've never got round to it.

Well, I personally find it fairly usefull to debug a certain set of memory
problems.  So, for me, it would be nice.

Jonathan