Re: +initialize and static (class) variables

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, September 4, 2001, at 05:30 PM, Aurelien wrote:

> Le mardi 4 septembre 2001, à 06:31, Richard Frith-Macdonald a écrit :
>
> > Well, the above code looks fine, and works for me.
> > The only unusual thing about 'advRequiredConstructors = [[NSArray 
> > alloc] initWithObjects: nil]' is
> > that it is a varargs method ... so it does begin to sound as if you 
> > have compiler problems, or perhaps
> > you picked up an incorrect stdarg.h/varargs.h when you built the 
> > libraries?
>
> But then, the following should lead to the same problems:
>
> NSLog ( @"Hello %s, it's now %d:%d", [[[NSString alloc] 
> initWithString:@"Aurélien"] cString], 19, 0 );

Or perhaps other problems entirely :-)

> It works though.
>
> Here are some more empirical results:
>
> thus declared is
>
> static NSArray *advRequiredConstructors;
>
> the following works:
>
> + initialize
> {
>   advRequiredConstructors = [NSArray array];
>   <placeholder>
> }
>
> anything I add in the <placeholder> which involves 
> advRequiredConstructors makes the program hang
> e.g. [advRequiredConstructors addObject:@""]

Well, that *should* raise an exception since NSArray does not respond to 
addObject:
However, legitamete methods of NSArray should work fine there.

> More, if I try to send messages to the static object elsewhere, the 
> program hangs too:

If you used [NSArray array] to initialise the variable, you should have 
got a warning about
a memory leak ... unless you had an autorelease pool.  If there was an 
autorelease pool in
place, the array may have been released before you got round to sending 
messages to it -
which would result in an exception or a crash.

Sounds like you need to step through this in gdb and find out what's 
really happening.
The fact that it all works fine when I run your code snippets on my 
system suggests that
either you have a compiler problem, or something elsewhere in your 
program is messing
things up (eg scribbling over memmory it shouldn't be touching).  That's 
really impossible
for me to check without having the entire program to run under debug.