[OS X TeX] Experimental TeXShop 3.32

Richard Koch koch at math.uoregon.edu
Mon Apr 7 14:16:12 EDT 2014


Folks,

An experimental version of TeXShop is available at

	http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/texshop.html

by going to the "Obtaining" page, and then the "Experimental" page.
This version is not yet available using the built in Sparkle upgrade
mechanism in TeXShop.

In this version I adopted ARC, the "automatic reference
counting" feature of Objective C. Under ARC, the compiler handles
memory management rather than leaving that task to the programmer.

A typical Cocoa program creates, uses, and throws away a large
number of "objects". Such programs are prone to two errors. If the
programmer forgets to throw objects away, then computer memory
can be overwhelmed with old useless objects. If the programmer
throws objects away too soon, the program will crash when trying
to access an object that no longer exists.

To relieve the programmer of the tasking of managing memory,
some object oriented languages like Java contain a feature called "garbage
collection" which periodically sweeps through memory, throwing away
unneeded objects. Apple added Garbage Collection to objective C in Leopard. 
When TeXShop moved to version 3 on Lion, the program was converted
from 32 bit code to 64 bit code. At that time, my ultimate goal was to add
garbage collection, but I never got around to it. 

The objective C used on the iPhone and iPad does not have garbage
collection, and in Mountain Lion Apple deprecated garbage collection
on Macs, warning that it would be removed from a future system.
Instead they recommend ARC, which works on the iPhone, the iPad,
and the Mac.

Dick Koch




More information about the MacOSX-TeX mailing list