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iOS Objective-C Basics (Retired) Beyond the Basics Pointers: Part 2

Posted by Fred Lawton
Fred Lawton
5,904 Points

Storing Pointers

It would be nice if the video discussed how a pointer is stored, and the different sizes of different types of pointers. I'm refreshing old skills, so please correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like passing by reference allows us to not copy large chunks of data. However, we still need to allocate memory for the pointer variable, correct?

Rodrigo Chousal
Rodrigo Chousal
16,009 Points
Rodrigo Chousal
Rodrigo Chousal
16,009 Points

I don't think we need to allocate memory for a pointer variable, since it's just a pointer. The pointer doesn't have real data in it, just the memory address of a variable. Since I'm not sure, I will link Amit Bijlani to this thread.

1 Answer

Amit Bijlani
STAFF
Amit Bijlani
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Amit Bijlani
Amit Bijlani
Treehouse Guest Teacher

When a function is called a stack frame or stack pointer is created which contains information like: function parameters, local variables and return types. All this information is pushed onto to the stack which is a "FILO" (first in, last out) data structure, that is managed and optimized by the CPU quite closely.