Bastiaan en Lily's blog

Finally I've got a little bit of time to write a family related post. I need to find some time to continue with my object posts but I'm sure I will soon.

The past few weeks have been pretty busy; Linsey getting fever for a couple of days due to some virus doing the rounds here and me not feeling honky dory as a result either didn't help much. Blake's been a real trooper so far without a sign of getting ill and is starting to sleep better and better; for a moment we thought Lily was getting sick as well but a good nights rest seems to have cured that. So it was time to treat the family to a much deserved outing..

Every since the whole discussion about object variables and object references in Studio came up this has been linguring in my mind so before I continue with my discussion on a way to use object variables in Omnis I felt compelled to do some ranting :)

I can't be certain but I imagine this discussion lies at the heart of the decision making of how Omnis originally implemented their object model and what direction they took it in.

As I was bragging about this on the Omnis list let's start doing a writeup about this. This will be a multipart writeup on object memory management in Omnis Studio 4 using object references.

This part we'll look at a simple retain/release object base class that allows us to track a single instance of an object that is being used by different parts of the system. It is a widely used model though my primary inspiration has been the use of it in Cocoa.
For the second part we'll look at implementing a copying scheme for our objects.
For the third part we'll look at auto releasing objects, why we need to do this and how we can implement this in Omnis.
The final part we'll look into tracking retains and releases in order to find memory leaks (not just leaks happening but finding the source).