performSelector may cause a leak because its selector is unknown

Anonymous User 2622 25 Apr 2015

I'm getting the following warning by the ARC compiler:

"performSelector may cause a leak because its selector is unknown".

Here's what I'm doing:

[_controller performSelector:NSSelectorFromString(@"someMethod")];

Why do I get this warning? I understand the compiler can't check if the selector exists or not, but why would that cause a leak? And how can I change my code so that I don't get this warning anymore?

Anonymous User

Other

I am a content writter !

1 Answers

Anonymous User 25 Apr 2015 Accepted Answer

The compiler is warning about this for a reason. It's very rare that this warning should simply be ignored, and it's easy to work around. Here's how:

SEL selector = NSSelectorFromString(@"someMethod");

IMP imp = [_controller methodForSelector:selector];

void (*func)(id, SEL) = (void *)imp;

func(_controller, selector);

Or more tersely (though hard to read):

SEL selector = NSSelectorFromString(@"someMethod");

((void (*)(id, SEL))[_controller methodForSelector:selector])(_controller, selector)

Explaination

What's going on here is you're asking the controller for the C function pointer for the method corresponding to the controller. All NSObjects respond to methodForSelector:, but you can also use class_getMethodImplementation in the Objective-C runtime (useful if you only have a protocol reference, like id<SomeProto>). These function pointers are called IMPs, and are simple typedefed function pointers (id (*IMP)(id, SEL, ...))1. This may be close to the actual method signature of the method, but will not always match exactly.

Once you have the IMP, you need to cast it to a function pointer that includes all of the details that ARC needs (including the two implicit hidden arguments self and _cmd of every Objective-C method call). This is handled in the third line (the (void *) on the right hand side simply tells the compiler that you know what you're doing and not to generate a warning since the pointer types don't match).

Finally, you call the function pointer.

forum

performSelector may cause a leak because its selector is unknown

Can you answer this question?

1 Answers