Objective C Make message to nil generate run time error

Question

Is it possible to make messages sent to nil generate some sort of error in run time? I want it for the debugging purpose.

Answer 1

You may want to look into the NSZombieEnabled environment variable.

As @jtbandes said, nil messages are generally a good thing because you can avoid going if (object) [object message] and instead just use [object message]. But a far more important thing to watch out for is sending a message to an object that once existed but has now been freed (without the pointer being nil-ed out). NSZombieEnabled lets you find out when this has happened.