Adobe After Effects Plugin With Cocoa (Overriding malloc)

Question

Messing about a bit, i have a working Adobe After Effects plugin with a bit of Obj-c / Cocoa in it (NSArray and custom objects - not ui stuff). The SDK guide states:-

Always use After Effects memory allocation functions. In low-memory conditions (such as during RAM preview), it’s very important that plug-ins not compete with After Effects for OS memory, and deal gracefully with out-of-memory conditions. Failing to use our functions can cause lock-ups, crashes, and tech support calls. Don’t do that. If you’re wrapping existing C++ code, overloading new and delete to use our functions will save substantial reimplementation. On Windows, derive all classes from a common base class which implements new and delete.

so my question.. is something compatible with the above statement possible in Obj-c?

I could probably swizzle alloc on NSObject if absolutely necessary, although i have no idea if something like NSArray uses NSObject's alloc method at all.

Answer 1

NSZone (which is what you'd need) is not extensible. CoreFoundation's allocators are extensible, but not everything you're allocating is a CF object underneath.

Unless you're allocating hundreds of megabytes of memory in your Objective-C code, I wouldn't worry.

Answer 2

I think that this would be very difficult.

The memory allocation/deallocation of Objective-C objects is complex and messing with it would be much more dangerous than the risk of crashing After Effects by not using the AE allocation functions, in my opinion.

This is probably a question for Adobe. If they are supporting their app on the Mac then they really need to offer support for Cocoa/Objective-C as it's the currently supported development methodology.

If I were Adobe, I'd be adding some sort of notification of a low memory situation, similar to the -didReceiveMemoryWarning notification in the iPhone SDK. But that doesn't help you in your current situation.

Answer 3

I think it could be done, but if your UI isn't going to be Cocoa based, I also think it would be a lot easier for you to just not use NSArray.