CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosobjective-c
etinum
etinum

Reputation: 55

Objective-C sending a message to an object not allocated

I want to know if there is any risk in passing a method to an instance that is NOT allocated? At the moment, the my code seems to work perfectly fine without any warnings. 

UIView *testview; 
[testview someMethod];

This doesn't cause any problem as far as I can observe but wanted to make sure that this is the case.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 99

Answers (1)

Arkku
Arkku

Reputation: 42139

Passing a message to nil is not an error in Objective-C, simply a NOP. However, passing a message to an incorrect address, such as an uninitialized or dangling pointer, is an error. Depending on the context where you define your uninitialized variable it may either be implicity initialized to nil or then you're just getting lucky with that memory being nil this time. But for the code to be guaranteed safe, you need to guarantee that it's either nil or pointing to a valid object. The simple way to do that is to initialize it explicitly: UIView *testview = nil;.

Upvotes: 5

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