Objective-C Pocket Reference

Root Classes

A root class is one with no parent class. Objective-C allows multiple root classes, but you are most likely to use one supplied with your compiler.

All Objective-C distributions provide a root class called Object. This section describes the Object supplied with the GNU runtime. The Object class provided by Darwin is similar, but Darwin users will be more likely to use the NSObject root class that comes with the Cocoa class library. (The GNUstep library also provides an NSObject root class almost identical to Cocoa’s.) This section describes the fields and methods of both Object and NSObject.

Both classes provide access to Objective-C features like reflection, memory management, and archiving. Most of the classes you write will inherit from one of these classes, so your objects will be able to use these features.

Note

The runtime goes to some length to make class objects behave the same as regular objects. In particular, they appear to inherit their fields and methods from the root classes, so they share in the properties described in this section.

Fields

Both Object and NSObject declare only one field, isa , whose type is Class. This field is inherited by all their descendants, which is critical to the operation of inheritance and message dispatch. It points to the class object representing the instance’s class. See Section 1.9 earlier in this book.

Methods

Root class methods are accessible from any object that derives from the class—usually all regular objects in a program. ...