What happens if a UITableViewCell is not released?

Question

What will happen if the autorelease is removed from cell creation in

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {    

STVCell *cell = (STVCell*)[tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
        if (cell == nil) {
            cell = [[[STVCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease];
        }
}

Answer 1

Nothing. And that's a bad thing: The cell will never be released and become a memory leak.

Answer 2

It will lead to a memory leak.

Because you call alloc, you are responsible for also calling release (or in this case autorelease).

The UITableView will automatically retain the cell and release its use of the cell at the appropriate time, but unless your code also releases the reference that it holds, the cell can never be deallocated.