What is the difference between class and instance methods?

objective-c oop methods class-method instance-methods
Devoted picture Devoted · Jun 27, 2009 · Viewed 324.5k times · Source

What's the difference between a class method and an instance method?

Are instance methods the accessors (getters and setters) while class methods are pretty much everything else?

Answer

Cory Kilger picture Cory Kilger · Jun 27, 2009

Like most of the other answers have said, instance methods use an instance of a class, whereas a class method can be used with just the class name. In Objective-C they are defined thusly:

@interface MyClass : NSObject

+ (void)aClassMethod;
- (void)anInstanceMethod;

@end

They could then be used like so:

[MyClass aClassMethod];

MyClass *object = [[MyClass alloc] init];
[object anInstanceMethod];

Some real world examples of class methods are the convenience methods on many Foundation classes like NSString's +stringWithFormat: or NSArray's +arrayWithArray:. An instance method would be NSArray's -count method.

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