Memory management - finding bugs earlier

Question

I just spent a lot of time debugging a dumb mistake, (releasing a variable that I hadn't allocated) and wondered if there's a way to have XCode's Analyze warn me next time. The code was something like this:

@synthesize alfa, beta;
…
NSString *temp1 = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@"AlfaText];
self.alfa = temp1;
[temp1 release];

NSString *temp2 = @"BetaText";
self.beta = temp2;
[temp2 release]

The last statement is (obviously?) a bug. Analyze seems to do a good job of reporting when you have too few [release]s, and having too many seems to be just as analyzable. Is there something that can be turned on that I'm missing?

Answer 1

If the static analyzer didn't catch that, please file a bug. It really should have.

If you convert your projects to use ARC, both the lack of writing retain/release at all combined with the better analysis performed by the compiler will lead to many fewer memory management bugs.