Strange behavoir when decoding an NSArray via NSSecureCoding

i spent all afternoon banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why decoding of this class was failing. the class has a property that is an NSArray of Foo objects. Foo conforms to NSSecureCoding, and i have successfully encoded and decoded that class by itself. i was getting an error in initWithCoder: that said failed to decode class Foo. through some experimentation, i discovered that i needed to add [Foo class] to initWithCoder: in order for it to work. maybe this will help someone else who's having the same problem. my question is, why is this necessary? i found no suggestion that this is necessary in apple's documentation.

#import "Foo.h"

@interface MyClass : NSObject <NSSecureCoding>
@property (nonatomic) NSArray *bunchOfFoos;
@end

@implementation MyClass

static NSString *kKeyFoo = @"kKeyFoo";

+ (BOOL) supportsSecureCoding
{
    return YES;
}

- (void) encodeWithCoder:(NSCoder *)encoder
{
    [encoder encodeObject:self.bunchOfFoos forKey:kKeyFoo];
}

- (id) initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)decoder
{
    if (self = [super init])
    {
        [Foo class]; // Without this, decoding fails
        _bunchOfFoos = [decoder decodeObjectOfClass:[NSArray class] forKey:kKeyFoo];
    }
    return self;
}

@end

i think i may have figured this out. without the line [Foo class], there is no reference to the class Foo in this file. because of this, i believe the compiler is optimizing the Foo class out, and then the Foo objects within the array cannot be decoded. having [Foo class] in there prevents this.