objective-c-literals

I came across the following: NSArray *array = @[object1, object2]; It seems to be creating an NSArray , but is this array instance an autoreleased object, or must I release it? wattson12 This is a new collection literal available in the compiler that ship with xcode 4.4 and above @[object1, object2]; is equivalent to [NSArray arrayWithObjects:object1, object2, nil]; so yes, it is an autoreleased object, if you need this to be retained, you can do myRetainedArray = [@[object1, object2] retain]; this question has a good description of all of the new literals It's the new llvm compiler's literal

Is there a difference between NSArray *myArray = @[objectOne, objectTwo, objectThree]; and NSArray *myArray = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:objectOne, objectTwo, objectThree, nil]; Is one preferred over the other? They are almost identical, but not completely. The Clang documentation on Objective-C Literals states: Array literal expressions expand to calls to +[NSArray arrayWithObjects:count:] , which validates that all objects are non-nil. The variadic form, +[NSArray arrayWithObjects:] uses nil as an argument list terminator, which can lead to malformed array objects. So NSArray *myArray = @

Although the overloading of @ begins to tread on dangerous territory, I love the addition of the new Objective-C literals in Clang 3.1. Unfortunately the new literals are of limited use to me. Except for instances where code needs to interface with AppKit, I've mostly dropped the use of Foundation classes in favor of my own custom framework (for a variety of reasons; most of which is that I need direct control over the memory allocation patterns used by objects). I could always use some runtime trickery to pass off the newly created object as my custom class (and is what I already have to do