RFC Distributed Object behavior for pointers

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

DO supports return of pointer values and passing of them as arguments.

eg.

char *methodReturningACString;

would return a nul terminated string of characters and

struct foo *methodReturningStructPointer;

would return a pointer to a struct.


in NeXTstep, the memory holding the returned data was owned by the 
*caller*, so you had to do -

char *ptr = [obj methodReturningACString];
// Use ptr
if ([obj isProxy]) free(ptr);

I don't know how OPENSTEP does this ...
Does it work like NeXTstep or does it return a pointer to autoreleased 
memory?

How should GNUstep do it?
Do we want to make the calling code check to see if it is calling a 
method via DO, and free the memory explicity, or do we want to use 
autoreleased memory for consistency with the way objects are returned, 
and have the caller copy the contents of the memory if it wants to keep 
it?
The second form seems better to me, but I don't know what OPENSTEP does.