Vincent Gable’s Blog

July 19, 2010

#define String

When I need a string-constant, I #define it, instead of doing the “right” thing and using an extern const NSString * variable.

UPDATE 2010-07-20

Thanks to Elfred Pagen for pointing out that you should always put () around your macros. Wrong: #define A_STRING @"hello"

instead use (), even when you don’t think you have to:

#define A_STRING (@"hello")

This prevents accidental string concatenation. In C, string-literals separated only by whitespace are implicitly concatenated. It’s the same with Objective-C string literals. This feature lets you break long strings up into several lines, so NSString *x = @"A long string!" can be rewritten:

NSString *x =
	@"A long"
	@" string!";

Unfortunately, this seldom-used feature can backfire in unexpected ways. Consider making an array of two strings:

#define X @"ex"
#define P @"plain"
a = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:X
                              P,
                              nil];

That looks right, but I forgot a “,” after X, so after string-concatenation, a is ['explain'], not ['ex','plain'].

Moral of the story: you can never have too many ()’s in macros.

And, now, back to why I use #define

It’s less code

Using an extern variable means declaring it in a header, and defining it in some implementation file. But a macro is just one line in a header.

It’s faster to lookup

Because there’s only the definition of a macro, Open Quickly/command-double-clicking a macro always jumps to the definition, so you can see what it’s value is in one step. Generally Xcode jumps to a symbol’s declaration first, and then it’s definition, making it slower to lookup the value of a const symbol.

It’s still type safe

An @"NSString literal" has type information, so mistakes like,

#define X (@"immutable string")
NSMutableString *y = X;
[y appendString:@"z"];

still generate warnings.

It lets the compiler check format-strings

Xcode can catch errors like “[NSString stringWithFormat:@"reading garbage since there's no argument: %s"]“, if you let it. Unfortunately, the Objective-C compiler isn’t smart enough to check [NSString stringWithFormat:externConstString,x,y,z]; because it doesn’t know what an extern variable contains until link-time. But preprocessor macros are evaluated early enough in the build process that that the compiler can check their values.

It can’t be changed at runtime

It’s possible to change the value of const variables through pointers, like so:

const NSString* const s = @"initial";
NSString **hack = &s;
*hack = @"changed!";
NSLog(s);//prints "changed!"

Yes this is pathological code, but I’ve seen it happen (I’m looking at you AddressBook.framework!)

Of course, you can re-#define a preprocessor-symbol, so macros aren’t a panacea for pathological constant-changing code. (Nothing is!) But they push the pathology into compile time, and common wisdom is that it’s easier to debug compile-time problems, so that’s a Good Thing. You may disagree there, and you may be right! All I can say for sure is that in my experience, I’ve had bugs from const values changing at runtime, but no bugs from re-#define-ed constants (yet).

Conclusion

Preprocessor macros are damnably dangerous in C. Generally you should avoid them. But for NSString* constants in applications, I think they’re easier, and arguably less error prone. So go ahead and #define YOUR_STRING_CONSTANTS (@"like this").

May 17, 2010

Don’t Check For nil in Your dealloc Methods

Filed under: Cocoa,Programming | , ,
― Vincent Gable on May 17, 2010

There’s no need to check if a variable is nil before release-ing it, because calling a method on a NULL variable is a no-op in Objective-C. And the runtime already has a super-fast check for this case.  So adding an extra if test into your code will probably slow things down.

Doing a pointless ” ==?nil”  test is bad for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s more code for no good reason. Even if it’s just one more line, It’s one more line to debug and test. It’s one more place where something could go wrong.

Secondly, it’s not idiomatic Cocoa-code, so it signals that something strange is going on. That’s a problem for whoever is reading the code, because they have to stop and look around more carefully to figure out why the pointless tests are happening.

In summary, do NOT do this:

– (void)dealloc;

{

if(baseImage) {

[baseImage release];

baseImage = nil;

}

[super dealloc];

}?

Do this:

– (void)dealloc;

{

[baseImage release];

baseImage = nil;

[super dealloc];

}

October 20, 2009

Knuth can be Out of Touch

Filed under: Accessibility,Programming,Quotes | , ,
― Vincent Gable on October 20, 2009

…Knuth has a terrible track record, bringing us TeX, which is a great typesetting language, but impossible to read, and a three-volume set of great algorithms written in some of the most impenetrable, quirky pseudocode you’re ever likely to see.

lingpipe

There, it’s been said. But let the posse note I wasn’t technically the one to do it!

October 19, 2009

sizeof() Style

Filed under: Bug Bite,C++,Objective-C,Programming,Tips | , ,
― Vincent Gable on October 19, 2009

Never say sizeof(sometype) when you can say sizeof(a_variable). The latter works even if the type of a_variable changes, and it is much more obvious what the size is supposed to represent.

September 11, 2009

Never Start An Integer With 0

When programming, never start an integer with 0. Most programming languages treat a decimal number that starts with 0 as octal (base-8). So x = 013; does not set x to 13. Instead x is 11, because 013 is interpreted as 138 not 1310.

Languages with this quirk include: C, C++, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python 3.0, and Ruby. If you add up the “market share” of these languages, it comes out to above 50%, which is why I say most languages.

“But I use {Smalltalk, Haskell, Lisp, etc.}”

I’m jealous that you get to use such a nice language. However, it’s bad programming hygiene to pick up habits that are dangerous in common languages.

Now, I assume you wouldn’t write 7 as 007, unless the leading zero(s) carried some extra meaning. There are cases where this clarity outweighs “cleanliness” (unless the code meant to be ported to a C-like language).

But you should at least be aware of this inter-lingual gotcha.

May 14, 2009

Emergent Libraries

I have latched onto an idea, but don’t have the resources to follow up on it: could a static-analysis tool identify repeated patterns of code, across many code bases, that should be extracted out as subroutines and higher-level functions? How universal would these “emergent libraries” be?

My inspiration here is Section 4.1 Identifying Common Functions, in the excellent paper Some Thoughts on Security After Ten Years of qmail 1.0 (PDF), by Daniel J. Bernstein,

Most programmers would never bother to create such a small function. But several words of code are saved whenever one occurrence of the dup2()/close() pattern is replaced with one call to fd_move(); replacing a dozen occurrences saves considerably more code than were spent writing the function itself. (The function is also a natural target for tests.) The same benefit scales to larger systems and to a huge variety of functions; fd_move() is just one example. In many cases an automated scan for common operation sequences can suggest helpful new functions, but even without automation I frequently find myself thinking “Haven’t I seen this before?” and extracting a new function out of existing code.

What’s particularly fascinating to me are the new operations we might find.

Before I was exposed to the Haskell prelude I hadn’t known about the fundamentally useful foldl and foldr operations. I had written dozens of programs that used accumulation, but it’s generalization hadn’t occurred to me — and probably never would have. Static analysis can help uncover generalizations that we might have missed, or didn’t think were important, but turn out in practice to be widely used operations.

January 7, 2009

Objective-C 1.0 Style: Don’t Name Your Enumerators “enumerator”!

Disclaimer

There is a better way to iterate over collections in Objective-C 1.0. You really should use it. It’s easier to write, easier to read, less prone to bugs, faster, and makes what I’m going to rant about here a non-issue, because you won’t have any NSEnumerator variables in your code.

Badly Named Problem

The standard iteration idiom in Objective-C 1.0 is:

NSEnumerator *enumerator = [collection objectEnumerator];
id element = nil;
while( nil != (element = [enumerator nextObject]) ) {
   ;//do stuff...
}

Unfortunately, I see otherwise steller programmers name their NSEnumerator variables “enumerator”. That’s always wrong, because it does not tell you what the enumerator enumerates. We already know that enumerator enumerates things, because it’s type is NSEnumerator, unless it’s name tells us more then that it’s hardly better then no name at all.

This is an especially amateurish practice because …

Naming an Enumerator Well is Easy!

Call it, the plural of the element variable. And if that won’t work you can always fall back on calling it collectionEnumerator.

For example, to fix:

NSEnumerator *enumerator = [input objectEnumerator];
NSString *path = nil;
while (path = [enumerator nextObject])

We should name enumerator paths or inputEnumerator. You might find “paths” to be too close to “path” in which case let the “plural form” of element be everyElement, giving everyPath.

These rules can be applied without much thought, but will improve the clarity of code.

Why enumerator is Worse Than i

Firstly, the practice of naming an the index in a for-loop i is not good. You can avoid it by renaming i to thingThatIsIndexedIndex.

But at least, for(int i = 0; i < collection.size(); i++), is concise; therefore better than a equally-poorly-named NSEnumerator.

Also, there is something to be said for the idiom you can just use collection[i] over declaring an extra element variable.

The Right Choice

Everyone agrees informative names are good, yet poorly named enumerators are everywhere (just browse Apple’s sample code!) Poorly named enumerators persist because nobody really uses an enumerator per se, they are just part of an iteration idiom. (So stop declaring them and iterate smarter). When was the last time you saw code that did anything with an enumerator besides [enumerator nextObject] in a while loop?

But bad habits matter. Don’t pick up the habit of naming something poorly when it’s easy to do the right thing.

December 4, 2008

Cocoa Coding Style Minutia: All Forward Declarations on One Line is the One True Way

This is a very petty point, but I believe there’s a right answer, and since it’s come up before I’m going to take the time to justify the best choice.

Forward Declare Classes on One Line, Not Many Lines

Right:
@class Foo, Bar, Baz...;

This is the style that Apple’s headers generally follow, look at NSDocument.h for example.

Wrong:
@class Foo;
@class Bar;
@class Baz;
...

Programming languages are to be read by people first, and interpreted by computers second. I really do hope anyone in software engineering can take that as an axiom!

Therefore, always favor brevity above all else with statements that are only for the compiler. They are by far the least important part of the code base. Keeping them terse minimizes distractions from code that can and should be read.

Naturally, it’s very hard to find a statement that’s only for the compiler. I can only think of one such statement in Objective-C, forward declarations of an object with @class.

What Does @class Do?

@class Foo; tells the compiler that Foo is an Objective-C class, so that it knows how much space to reserve in memory for things of type Foo. It does not tell the compiler what methods and ivars a Foo has, to do that you need to #import "Foo.h" (or have an @interface Foo... in your .m file.)

@class Foo; #import "Foo.h"
Foo is a black box. You can only use it as an argument. You can also send messages to Foo.

What is @class Good For?

Since #import "Foo.h" does everything @class Foo; does and more, why would you ever use @class? The short answer is less time wasted compiling.

Lets say you have a Controller class, and it has an ivar that’s a Foo. To get it to compile, you put #import "Foo.h" inside Controller.h. So far so good. The problem comes when Foo.h is changed. Now any file that has #import "Foo.h" in it must be recompiled. So Controller.h has to be recompiled. So any file that has #import "Controller.h" in it must also be recompiled, and so on. Many objects that don’t use Foo objects, but do talk to the Controller (or to something that talks to something that talks to the Controller!) have to be rebuilt as well. It’s likely that the entire project would end up being rebuilt. With even a moderately sized project, that means a lot of needless compile time!

One solution is to put a forward-declaration, @class Foo;, in Controller.h, and #import "Foo.h" in Controller.m, and the few files that actually do something to Foo objects. @class Foo; gives the compiler just enough information to build an object with a Foo* ivar, because it knows how much space that ivar will need in memory. And since only objects that need to talk to Foo objects directly have any dependency on Foo.h, changes to Foo can be tested quickly. The first time I tried this solution in one of my projects, compile times dropped from minutes to seconds.

Readers Need Less @class

Forward declarations add value to the development process, as does anything that saves programmers time. But @class tells a human reader nothing. Which is why I say you should use them in your code, but minimize the space they take up, by putting them all on one line.

@class Foo; tells a reader that “Foo is black-box that is a class.” That adds no useful information.

If the reader does not care about what a Foo is (they are treating it as a black box), then knowing that Foo is a class is useless information. Foo could be a struct, or a bit-field, or a function pointer, or anything else and they still would not need to know to understand the code.

Conversely, if they need to know what a Foo is to understand the code, then they need to know more then “it is a class”. They need to see Foo.h or documentation — @class just isn’t enough.

Exceptions

I want to again emphasize that this isn’t a big deal. I strongly feel that putting all forward declarations on one line is the right answer, but doing it wrong won’t perceptibly matter in the end.

So I don’t think there’s any reason to address exceptions to the rule. Do what you gotta do.

Best Practices

Use @class to speed up compile-times as much as you can, but use the keyword @class as little as possible, since it is for the compiler, not the person reading the code.

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