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In Objective-C it seems that the opposite of alloc is release (which undoes the memory allocation that alloc did), and the opposite of init is dealloc (which undoes the instance initialization done by init). Wouldn't a better name for dealloc be uninit or deinit?

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release doesn't undo the memory allocation. dealloc does that, but in NSObject. release merely triggers dealloc when the reference count reaches 0. – K.Steff Nov 10 '12 at 1:35

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2 Answers

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The opposite of alloc is dealloc while release is the direct opposite of retain.

More on dealloc on stackoverflow.

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OK so it seems that dealloc does 2 jobs, namely to undo what was done in both alloc and init? – JoelFan Nov 9 '12 at 19:37
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dealloc actually releases the memory held by an object. release just sends a message to an object to decrement its retain count; in calls dealloc when its retain count reaches 0.

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