Function Reference: Difference between revisions

Here, let's pretend that you are trying to change an object crucial to your application and you want to release the old one because you're a good memory citizen who cares about his users and their limited memory resources. So, you want to first release the old object and then set the pointer to the new one, right? But what if a nasty scenario occurs where you replace the object with itself? You release the old object, set the pointer to the memory address of the "new" object (which is, actually, the old object), try to dereference it (a fancy word for "use it") and boom - a wild unicorn appears and destroys your application '''if you're lucky'''. Usually, the memory is just cleared to be overwritten, the system might not use it immediately, therefore, in some cases - your application could work and make your life miserable by reports of crashing. You made a dangling pointer which references an object that was released (by you, a moment ago). Do you, perhaps, see how you could solve this? Yes, exactly. If newObject is NOT equal to Self (newObject != Self), then release the object referenced by Self and change the Self pointer/variable to point to newObject (Self = newObject). And you've solved all of your life's troubles. Kittens are purring. Birds are singing. And gamers are cursing at the dragon that killed them because your game or mod is awesome.  

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