Theocacao Comment for "Replacing Objective-C Methods at Runtime"

Comment on "Replacing Objective-C Methods at Runtime"
by Matt Gallagher — Mar 30

Note about this approach (often called "method swizzling") in Objective-C 2.0:

In Objective-C 2.0 (Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and later) the approved way to do this uses the method_exchangeImplementations function instead. As in:

Method frogs =
    class_getInstanceMethod([MiniObject class], @selector(generateFrogs));
Method lizards =
    class_getInstanceMethod([Controller class], @selector(generateLizards));
method_exchangeImplementations(lizards, frogs);

This approach is safer and atomic.

For those asking about applications of this approach: it is mostly used for debugging. If you replace methods like -[NSObject dealloc] but still invoke the default from your replacement, then you can perform all kinds of memory logging/debugging, etc.

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