iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

21Instruments

In Chapter 4, you learned about using the debugger to find and fix problems in your code. Now we’re going to look at other tools available to iOS programmers and how you can integrate them into your application development.

Static Analyzer

When you build an application, you can ask Xcode to analyze your code. The static analyzer then makes educated guesses about what would happen if that code were to be executed and informs you of potential problems. It does this without executing the code.

When the static analyzer checks the code, it examines each function and method individually by iterating over every possible code path. A method can have a number of control statements (if, for, switch, etc.). The conditions of these statements ...