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Roundtable on Apple's Future
John Murrell writes "Given the insatiable appetite for Apple rumors, analysis and speculation, SiliconValley.com has opened a week long roundtable discussion on the company's post-Intel future. Among those on the panel are Andy Hertzfeld, Tim Bray, Brent Simmons, John Gruber, Keven Krewell, Mark Gonzales and Leander Kahney."
May I quote:
"Called by the garbage collector when the receiver is not referenced by other objects.
Note: Garbage collection is not available for use in Mac OS X v10.4, nor in earlier versions.
The garbage collector invokes this method on the receiver before disposing of the memory it uses. When garbage collection is enabled, this method is invoked instead of dealloc."
There's already build options for turning garbage collection on in your own projects; however, it doesn't work yet. But you can be damn sure Apple is working on it (most of Foundation's objects already implement the finalize method, as do the more recent frameworks such as CoreData or CoreImage).
They're not rumors pal, they said it loud and clear at last year's WWDC. Garbage collection is coming.
- tristan
Hardly rumours. Garbage collection was added to the Objective-C runtime with Tiger. The GNU Objective-C runtime has supported the Boehm GC for some time, and Apple recently introduced their own GC.
GNUstep has been used with GC (using a Smalltalk bridge), where the GC simply called the release methods on objects when it detected that references had gone away. This works for Foundation, but not for AppKit. The problem with AppKit is that, in a lot of cases, no one retains references to AppKit objects. Combining AppKit and GC requires AppKit to be hacked a bit so references to components are kept.
The problem with Objective-C is that when you start trying to improve it you end up re-inventing Smalltalk. The GNUstep project is currently looking at using C for very low-level things, Objective-C for libraries and Smalltalk for applications. Since Objective-C and Smalltalk share an object model, it is very easy to interface the two.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Fucking nice.