What's the difference between sending -release or -drain to an Autorelease Pool?

iphone cocoa cocoa-touch memory-management autorelease
Thanks picture Thanks · Apr 28, 2009 · Viewed 11.2k times · Source

In many Books and on many Sites I see -drain. Well, for an Autorelease Pool that sounds cool. But does it do anything other than an release? I would guess -drain just makes the Pool to -release all it's objects, without releasing the Pool itself. Just a guess.

Answer

smorgan picture smorgan · Apr 28, 2009

Note that the comments on oxigen's answer saying that -drain does not release the NSAutoreleasePool are not correct. The documentation for NSAutoreleasePool clearly says that -drain releases (and thus destroys) the NSAutoreleasePool.

-drain is a replacement for using -release for NSAutoreleasePool objects, the only difference being that provides a hint to the garbage collection system.

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