Setting an object nil versus release+realloc

Question

This is not a garbage collected environment

I have a class instance variable which at some point in my runtime, I need to re-initialize with a different data set than it

Answer 1

One way to realize the difference might be this: Setting a reference to an object to nil does nothing to the object, it only does something to the reference.

"Releasing the object" is not "nothing", so it doesn't do that. :) In a garbage-collected language it might do that as a side-effect of dropping the reference, but in Objective C it doesn't work that way.