Can I have details about memory management?

speeder_kidoteca

How I destroy stuff? Just doing a "nil" on them is enough?


What happen if I do this?

local group;
do
local someText = TextField.new(...);
group:AddChild(someText);
stage:AddChild(group);
end

my theories: one, is that someText is retained until you delete group, the other, is that as soon someText is out of scope it gets deleted, and disappears from group. So, what one is it?

ar2rsawseen

Check out this post:
http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/9441#Comment_9441

speeder_kidoteca

So, if I undertstood, on my case, the result would be that the "someText" remains working correctly, and to delete it I need to:

remove it from group...

OR

remove group from stage AND set group to nil.

Is that correct?

ar2rsawseen

yes removing from the group
yes remove group from the stage
but setting group to nil depends on the scope, if it goes outside the scope (for example it is in function), then you don't have to nil it

speeder_kidoteca

Ok, thanks

And that example my intention is that group is local to the chunk. I don't think chunks ever go out of scope in gideros if they run on start or are called with "require", are they?

ar2rsawseen

their scope is usually the whole file and most probably you are right, it remains in memory all the time

john26

One easy way to think about it is to ask yourself, "is there any way I can access this object". If the answer is no then the object will be garbage collected.

So...

foo=Bitmap.new(Texture.new("foo.png")) stage:addChild(foo) foo=nil

I've now nilled out the object but can I still access it? Yes, through stage:getChildAt(1). So the object will not be garbage collected, Gideros is maintaining a link to it.

What about this

foo=Bitmap.new(Texture.new("foo.png")) bar=Bitmap.new(Texture.new("bar.png"))   stage:addChild(foo) foo:addChild(bar) foo=nil foo:removeFromParent()

I can access bar from foo using foo:getChildAt(1), but I can't access foo at all so there is really no way to access foo or bar: both are garbage collected.