Re: RFC Distributed Object behavior for pointers

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Sunday, April 13, 2003, at 09:32  am, Willem Rein Oudshoorn wrote:
> > 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.

From tests it seems MacOS-X does it like GNUstep currently does it ... 
with
autoreleased data.

> What about a third alternative?
>
> - tie the lifespan of the returned memory to the lifespan of the proxy
>   object.

The problem with that is that if the proxy is a server object, it's 
lifetime could
be weeks, months, or years, and it could return billions of strings over
that lifetime.

Probably the current autorelease behavior is what we want ... it's 
consistent
with the way that memory is managed for objects.