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Confusion About Objective-C's Memory Management (Cocoa)
Hello everyone, There is one thing about Objective-C's memory management that confuses me, which is a returned object's lifetime from methods with names doesn't start with "alloc", "new", "copy", or "mutableCopy". Take this as an example, when using NSBitmapImageRep's representationUsingType:properties: method, it returns an NSData object (reference: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsbitmapimagerep/representation(using:properties:)?language=objc). While testing this out, the NSData seemed to be an owned object (it doesn't get released until the end of the program). From what I understand, this may be an auto-released object which is released at the end of an autorelease pool block. Could someone explain this in more detail? What if I want to release that NSData object before the end of the autorelease pool block? How can I know which object is autoreleased, borrowed, or owned?
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Jan ’25
Apple Accelerate libSparse performance
I've created a Julia interface for Apple Accelerate's libSparse, via calling the library functions as if they were C (@ccall). I'm interested in using this in the context of power systems, where the sparse matrix is the Jacobian or the ABA matrix from a sparse grid network. However, I'm puzzled by the performance. I ran a sampling profiler on repeated in-place solves of Ax = b for a large sparse matrix A and random dense vectors b. (A is size 30k, positive definite so Cholesky factorization.) The 2 functions with the largest impact are _SparseConvertFromCoordinate_Double from libSparse.dylib, and BLASStateRelease from libBLAS.dylib. That strikes me as bizarre. This is an in-place solve: there should be minimal overheard from allocating/deallocating memory. Also, it seems strange that the library would repeatedly convert from coordinate form. Is this expected behavior? Thinking it might be an artifact of the Julia-C interface, I wrote up a similar program in C/Objective-C. I didn't profile it, but timing the same operation (repeated in-place solves of Ax = b for random vectors b, with the same matrix A as in the Julia) gave the same duration. I've attached the C/Objective-C below.profiling-comparison.m.txt If you're familiar with Julia, the following will give you the matrix I was working with: using PowerSystems, PowerNetworkMatrices sys = System("pglib_opf_case30000_goc.m") A = PowerNetworkMatrices.ABA_Matrix(sys).data where you can find the .m file here. (As a crude way to transfer A from Julia to C, I wrote the 3 arrays A.nzval, A.colptr, and A.rowval to .txt files as space-separated lists of numbers: the above C/objective-C reads in those files.) To duplicate my Julia profiling, do pkg> add AppleAccelerate#libSparse Profile--note the #libSparse part, these features aren't on the main branch--then run using AppleAccelerate, Profile # run previous code snippet to define A M, N = 10000, size(A)[1] bs = [rand(N) for _ in 1:M] aa_fact = AAFactorization(A) factor!(aa_fact) solve!(aa_fact, bs[1]) # pre-compile before we profile. Profile.init(n = 10^6, delay = 0.0003) @profile (for i in 1:M; solve!(aa_fact, bs[i]); end;) Profile.print(C = true, format = :flat, sortedby = :count)
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Jan ’25
Unexpected behavior of dispatch_main on macOS
Hi! We are seeing a bit surprising behavior of dispatch_main on macOS where it seems to spawn a different thread instead of preserving the one it gets called from. Managed to reproduce it in a completely empty command-line tool project in Xcode int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) { @autoreleasepool { dispatch_main(); return 0; } } I put a breakpoint on the line with dispatch_main and see that I am on Thread 1 and inside main function. That makes sense. I resume execution and pause again. Looking at Thread output in Xcode, I can only see Thread 2. Thread 1 is gone and the executable keeps on running. So dispatch_main did what was expected (prevented the process from termination) but throws out the thread it was called from and creates a new one? Is that behavior expected or am I missing something? Just a brain teaser at this point. But we could not make sense out of it. :)
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Jan ’25
Odd Shell Echo Output...
I have a simple shell script as follows: #!/bin/bash OUTPUT="network.$(date +'%d-%m-%y').info.txt" SUPPORT_ID="emailaddress" echo "---------------------------------------------------" > $OUTPUT echo "Run date and time: $(date)" >> $OUTPUT echo "---------------------------------------------------" >> $OUTPUT ifconfig >> $OUTPUT echo "---------------------------------------------------" >> $OUTPUT echo "Network info written to file: $OUTPUT." echo "Please email this file to: $SUPPORT_ID." It just dumps the network config into a file. At some point I will have the file emailed out, but right now I'm just trying to figure out why the output looks like the following? bash ./test.sh .etwork info written to file: network.26-01-25.info.txt .lease email this file to: emailaddress Why in the world does the initial character of the last couple of "echo" commands get clipped and turned into periods? The echos for the output of the commands piped into the output file are fine. Strange... Any ideas?
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533
Jan ’25
Odd Echo Output From Shell Script
I have a simple shell script as follows: #!/bin/bash OUTPUT="network.$(date +'%d-%m-%y').info.txt" SUPPORT_ID="email" echo "---------------------------------------------------" > $OUTPUT echo "Run date and time: $(date)" >> $OUTPUT echo "---------------------------------------------------" >> $OUTPUT ifconfig >> $OUTPUT echo "---------------------------------------------------" >> $OUTPUT echo "Network info written to file: $OUTPUT." echo "Please email this file to: $SUPPORT_ID." It just dumps the network config into a file. At some point I will have the file emailed out, but right now I'm just trying to figure out why the output looks like the following? bash ./test.sh .etwork info written to file: network.26-01-25.info.txt .lease email this file to: email Why in the world does the initial character of the last couple of "echo" commands get clipped and turned into periods? The echos for the output of the commands piped into the output file are fine. Strange... Any ideas?
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Jan ’25
Can't access C/C++ basic libraries
Hello, I am a software engineer student and I have recently been getting problems on my Mac regarding the C/C++ libraries. I have used my macbook for uni work for months, but around 3 or 4 months ago my macbook could not compile my work since it couldnt find the basic libraries I was using. For example, iostream. I have been using VSCode, and what it exactly says is "cannot open source file "iostream". Please run the 'Select IntelliSense Configuration...' command to locate your system headers." I have tried researching, changing the include path, even using chatgpt, and nothing. Is anyone having this same problem, or is able to help me? If any other information is needed, please let me know!
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Jan ’25
Manually calling the superclass's dealloc in the overridden dealloc method causes a crash
I have a class object created dynamically using Runtime, and I want to release some manually allocated memory resources when this object is deallocated. To achieve this, I added a custom implementation of the dealloc method using the following code: SEL aSel = NSSelectorFromString(@"dealloc"); class_addMethod(kvoClass, aSel, (IMP)custom_dealloc, method_getTypeEncoding(class_getInstanceMethod(kvoClass, aSel))); However, I encountered some issues. If I don't call the superclass's dealloc method in the cus_dealloc function, the superclass's dealloc implementation will not be executed. On the other hand, if I explicitly call the superclass's dealloc method, the program crashes. Here is the implementation of the cus_dealloc function: void custom_dealloc(id self, SEL _cmd) { // Release other memory ![]("https://developer.apple.com/forums/content/attachment/c7b0c16b-be23-4776-b8db-f22b661c5e7d" "title=iShot_2025-01-03_19.31.34.png;width=1080;height=1895") Class superClass = class_getSuperclass(object_getClass(self)); void (*originIMP)(struct objc_super *, SEL, ...) = (void *)objc_msgSendSuper; struct objc_super *objcSuper = &(struct objc_super){self, superClass}; originIMP(objcSuper, _cmd); } demo
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Jan ’25