Hi,
I would like to propose updating the WebKit coding style to recommend avoiding
autorelease in Objective C whenever possible, for the following reasons:
- Performance reasons:
- Cleaning up objects from all over the memory space in an autorelease pool
can be slow and can cause memory spikes.
- Memory Safety:
- Holding a RetainPtr to the object makes lifetime clearer, whereas
autorelease pool draining is not as clear and can result in use-after-free bugs.
- Easier debugging:
- Memory corruption bugs are harder to debug when it happens during
autorelease pool drain.
Concretely, this means writing code like this:
```
RetainPtr extensionDatabaseQueueName = adoptNS([[NSString alloc]
initWithFormat:@"com.apple.WebKit.WKWebExtensionSQLiteStore.%@",
_uniqueIdentifier]);
String foo = “foo”_s;
[object callWith:foo.createNSString().get()];
URL foo = “https://www.webkit.org”_s;
[object callWith:foo.createNSURL().get()];
```
Instead of:
```
NSString *extensionDatabaseQueueName = [NSString
stringWithFormat:@"com.apple.WebKit.WKWebExtensionSQLiteStore.%@",
_uniqueIdentifier];
RetainPtr extensionDatabaseQueueName = [NSString
stringWithFormat:@"com.apple.WebKit.WKWebExtensionSQLiteStore.%@",
_uniqueIdentifier];
String foo = “foo”_s;
[object callWith:(NSString *)foo]; // This does autorelease internally.
URL foo = “https://www.webkit.org”_s;
[object callWith:(NSURL *)foo]; // This does autorelease internally.
```
Example PR: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/43656
What do you think?
Thanks,
Chris Dumez.
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