Using DestroyImmediate on Arrays?

Questions & Answers
1

The docs say this about destroying objects in an array using DestroyImmediate:

“Also note that you should never iterate through arrays and destroy the elements you are iterating over. This will cause serious problems…”

Surely they mean a dynamic array? What’s the problem with doing it on a static array? I understand on a dynamically allocated array that the contents may be shuffled/removed, but I thought it was safe on a static array.

I’m writing an editor script (C#) for which I need to Instantiate clones of a GameObject and store them in this static array:

private GameObject[] cloneSteps = new GameObject[12];

Further on I need to destroy them before re-instantiating them, so I do iterate over them:

if(cloneSteps != null){
	for(int i=0; i<12; i++)
	{
		if( cloneSteps *!= null)*

_ DestroyImmediate(cloneSteps*);_
_ }_
_}*_
I have been getting an intermittent bug, so I’m wondering if this is faulty?
How else can you destroy/remove/delete objects in an array?
Am I right in thinking that there will be a memory leak if I simply overwrite the array before destroying the elements?
Thanks
Steve

2

Unity uses a heap with garbage collection as the memory model.

Am I right in thinking that there will
be a memory leak if I simply overwrite
the array before destroying the
elements?

No. You can simply overwrite the reference to some object. Assuming there are no other reference to it, the memory will be reclaimed the next time the memory manager. A couple of links:

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/UnderstandingAutomaticMemoryManagement.html

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/7853/garbage-collection.html