retainCount always is -1?

Question

Can anyone help, i have some code and i am checking the retainCount but its always -1, it should be 1 at least?

here is my code, what am i doing wrong?

    NSNumber* n = [[NSNumber alloc] initWithInt:100];

    NSLog(@"Count of   n : %i",[n retainCount]);

    NSNumber* n1 = n;

    NSLog(@"Count of   n : %i",[n retainCount]);
    NSLog(@"Count of   n1: %i",[n1 retainCount]);
    NSLog(@"Address of n : %p", n);
    NSLog(@"Address of n1: %p", n1);

The other strange thing i get is regarding the %i, saying that it actually returns a uint, so i replaced the %i to a %u and now i get a really long figure for the retainCount - 4294967295

A little confused, any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The result of -retainCount is worthless at your abstraction level, and this is another reason why.

…but to get on with your question: NSUIntegerMax indicates an immortal object.

You can find references to this in some documentation:

You might override this method in a class to implement your own reference-counting scheme. For objects that never get released (that is, their release method does nothing), this method should return UINT_MAX, as defined in <limits.h>.