Objective-C - Other Features

Other Features

Objective-C's features often allow for flexible, and often easy, solutions to programming issues.

  • Delegating methods to other objects and remote invocation can be easily implemented using categories and message forwarding.
  • Swizzling of the isa pointer allows for classes to change at runtime. Typically used for debugging where freed objects are swizzled into zombie objects whose only purpose is to report an error when someone calls them. Swizzling was also used in Enterprise Objects Framework to create database faults. Swizzling is used today by Apple’s Foundation Framework to implement Key-Value Observing.
  • Serialization, commonly called Archiving in Objective-C, can be done by overwriting read and write methods.

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