On 16 Feb 2020, at 23:59, Graham Cox <graham@...> wrote:

Normal rules require that you either autorelease it or release it when you’re done (assuming manual MM of course).

If no autorelease or release was required, then that would be an exception to normal rules, and NSAlert is not documented as an exception to those rules. However, the alert can stay on screen for a long time, and the event loop is running, albeit modally. That means that autorelease pools are getting drained. So *something* must be keeping the alert alive until the user dismisses it.

—Graham

On 17 Feb 2020, at 10:49 am, Alex Zavatone via Groups.Io <zav@...> wrote:

Sorry, A bit groggy here.  If my previous assumption that autorelease isn’t needed is incorrect, then it might be  that the instance will be retained until the reference to it is cleared or the enclosing object is deallocated.