Re: Running app with ARC turned off

[Daniel Santos]

Daniel Santos



> On 10 Dec 2024, at 14:08, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Daniel Santos wrote:
>> I agree, but my objective is to have ARC disabled to try to reproduce the 
>> memory allocations that happen in NeXT (that does not have ARC).
>> Meaning that with ARC disabled I will have to explicitly release objects and 
>> therefore catching memory allocation bugs that will happen on the NeXTStep 
>> version  of the code.
> 
> just out of curiosity. NeXTStep or OpenStep? The former is not compatible 
> with GNUstep, different API names and many different details, so I wonder how 
> you can write the same code.
> OpenStep instead is quite compatible.
> GNUstep itself doesn't need ARC and you can compile without ARC. Easy, just 
> use the GCC runtime and so alloc/release/autorelease will do the reference 
> counting. I don't know if you can disable ARC with clang
> 

NeXTStep 3.3 on black hardware. I am handling the differences with the 
preprocessor (basically #ifdef <a defined value>)
Most of the code is the same as I only use NSString, NSDictionary, NSArray (and 
the mutable subclasses) etc
Its the imports that are mostly different.

> 
> Furthermore for the opposite problem you can enable zombies (NSZombieEnabled 
> env variable), as to trace access to deallocated objects. But that is the 
> opposite of what you ask: it keeps everything "alive", but useful if you 
> debug manual reference counting, since accessing a dead object can be hard to 
> trace sometimes.
> 
> Riccardo