Re: [Pyobjc-dev] HelloWorld.py segfaults

[b.bum <bb...@ma...>]

On Monday, June 30, 2003, at 5:27 AM, Just van Rossum wrote:
> It doesn't. (It seems that delegates are not retained in general.)

Correct.

In general, delegates, observers, outlets and other "informal" 
connections between objects are not retained-- they are "weak 
references".   Unfortunately, a weak reference in Objective-C is more 
or less an invitation for your app to crash when you didn't expect it 
to -- I have never agreed with the decision to use this implementation 
pattern nor have I ever seen a reasonable explanation as to why such a 
choice was made.

Claims that doing so makes memory management easier are bogus.  Given 
the number of apps that have shipped such that closing a document leads 
to a crasher at some later time (most likely because a notification was 
sent to a deceased observer), this has clearly caused a lot of hell in 
the development community.  I would rather see apps that leak slightly 
than apps that crash at random because of retain/release issues.   
Leaks are much easier to fix than the latter.

Garbage collection is not an excuse for lazy coding.  You always have 
to clean up after yourself!

b.bum