What is the cost of using autorelease in Cocoa?

Question

Most of Apples documentation seems to avoid using autoreleased objects especially when creating gui views, but I want to know what the cost of using autoreleased objects is?

Answer 1

I have to disagree with Jim Puls - I think that not using Autorelease makes debugging more difficult, because you are more likely to find yourself accidentally leaking memory. Of course Clang static analyzer can pick up some of these instances, but for me, the slight overhead costs in habitually using autorelease are far overshadowed by my code being less likely to be buggy.

And then, only if I have a tight loop I need to optimize will I start looking at performance. Otherwise this is all just premature optimization, which is generally considered to be a bad thing.