I'm having difficulties to understand exactly WHEN autorelease pools are created and released in AppKit apps.
For example, if I have an ApplicationController class that overrides init, is there an autorelease pool that gets created before it starts and gets drained after it ends?
The main thread in an AppKit application runs an NSRunLoop to process events. NSRunLoop creates a new autorelease pool every time it processes a new event (or timer) and drains it once control flow has returned to the NSRunLoop. So in essence, every pass through the run loop has a fresh autorelease pool.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4047647/autorelease-pools-in-appkit-applications