Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / July 2008

In Cocoa, all objects are dynamically allocated.  In other words, you
have to write

    NSString *string = [NSString string];

assuming that what you wanted was to make "string" point to an empty
instance of NSString that can't ever be changed (because it's immutable).

This has nothing to do with typing (static or early typing vs. dynamic
or late typing).

This comes from C terminology.  Variables that are allocated once at
the beginning of the program and live forever are called in C 'static'
variables.  When their visibility is limited to the compilation unit
they are declared as:

'static' <type> <ident> [ '=' <initializer> ] ;

But when they are visible outside of the compilation unit, the
'static' keyword is droped.  But they are still "static", with a
link-unit scope.

This warning is to tell you that this object is allocated when the
static variables are initialized.  There is potentially problem with
that, because the order of initialization of these static variable
cannot be ensured by the compiler and linker, hence allocating and
initializing an Objective-C object at that time may require other
classes or objects that have not been initialized yet.

You're sure you didn't use this in the past?

NSString *string = [NSString string];

That sentence is funny. Know why?

Because you forgot the '*'.

G