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You're reading from  Object???Oriented Programming with Swift 2

Product typeBook
Published inJan 2016
Reading LevelIntermediate
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ISBN-139781785885693
Edition1st Edition
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Gaston C. Hillar
Gaston C. Hillar
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Gaston C. Hillar

Gaston C. Hillar is Italian and has been working with computers since he was 8 years old. Gaston has a Bachelor's degree in computer science (graduated with honors) and an MBA. Currently, Gaston is an independent IT consultant and a freelance author who is always looking for new adventures anywhere in the world. He was a senior contributing editor at Dr. Dobb's, and has written more than a hundred articles on software development topics. He has received the prestigious Intel Black Belt Software Developer award eight times. He has written many articles about Java for Oracle Java Magazine. Gaston was also a former Microsoft MVP in technical computing. He lives with his wife, Vanesa, and his two sons, Kevin and Brandon.
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Understanding deinitialization and its customization


At some specific times, our app won't require to work with an instance anymore. For example, once you calculate the perimeter of a regular hexagon and display the results to the user, you don't need the specific RegularHexagon instance anymore. Some programming languages require you to be careful about leaving live instances alive, and you have to explicitly destroy them and deallocate the memory that it consumed.

Swift uses an automatic reference counting, also known as ARC, to automatically deallocate the memory used by instances that aren't referenced anymore. When Swift detects that you aren't referencing an instance anymore, Swift executes the code specified within the instance's deinitializer before the instance is deallocated from memory. Thus, the deinitializer can still access all of the instance's resources.

Tip

You can think of deinitializers as equivalents of destructors in other programming languages such as C# and Java. You...

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Object???Oriented Programming with Swift 2
Published in: Jan 2016Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781785885693

Author (1)

author image
Gaston C. Hillar

Gaston C. Hillar is Italian and has been working with computers since he was 8 years old. Gaston has a Bachelor's degree in computer science (graduated with honors) and an MBA. Currently, Gaston is an independent IT consultant and a freelance author who is always looking for new adventures anywhere in the world. He was a senior contributing editor at Dr. Dobb's, and has written more than a hundred articles on software development topics. He has received the prestigious Intel Black Belt Software Developer award eight times. He has written many articles about Java for Oracle Java Magazine. Gaston was also a former Microsoft MVP in technical computing. He lives with his wife, Vanesa, and his two sons, Kevin and Brandon.
Read more about Gaston C. Hillar