Your goal is different from the original poster, who was building a test tool to deploy internally.
Yes, and no.
Awareness of available resources is very important to maintain for serious computing that stretches the capabilities of the underlying hardware.
This I am doing. We cannot do everything we want because the hardware of the iPad is not infinitely capable (have to wait for M3 for infinity mode, I guess)
We can do less than what the iPad is capable of because we cannot approach the limits, we have to keep well clear of them in case we hit them.
I come from a much more pure Unix programming environment where this sort of thing is easy. It is terribly difficult in iOS.
I am very interested in knowing how much memory the next allocation is going to use (sizeof(..)), and how much memory is left (not really a fixed target, and impossible to really know but most platforms have a way to estimate: get_avphys_pages (3) or GlobalMemoryStatusEx.
This bit me when loading and processing images on an iPad. Not a core activity, but it mattered. It turned out not to be limitations of the iPad that caused the problem, but some other (non apple) system. So I dropped it.
But this sort of thing comes at you, as an applications programmer, out of the blue.
It would be very helpful if Apple would address this directly, rather than the oblique fashion that you do.
It is not needed often, but when it is needed it is a life saver and makes for much better user experience in the end.
