Benefits when using static init in Objective C?

Question

Recently I\'ve discovered webrtc-ios example from Github. While I was browsing though the project I noticed that VideoView class uses static method and I\'m not sure is that nec

Answer 1

One difference between using a static function and an Objective-C method is that the static function cannot be overriden in a subclass. If the common init code is done in a

- (void)setup;

method, and a subclass MyVideoView of VideoView happens to implement a method with the same name, then

[[MyVideoView alloc] initWithFrame:..]

will call the subclass implementation, which might not be wanted.

In your code, initWithFrame/initWithCoder will always call the local init() function, even if an instance of a subclass is initialized.

If the common initialization is done in a method, then the method name should be more specific, to avoid that it is overriden "accidentally", for example

-(void)commonVideoViewSetup;