Preventing Automatic ivar Synthesis of @property

I have readonly properties that I would like to declare similarly to other properties:

@property (nonatomic, readonly) MyThing *thing;

Frequently, I definitely do not want an instance variable and getter method to be automatically synthesised for these properties. In such cases I have made an error if I forget to write an explicit getter for them, and I want the compiler to tell me and refuse to compile (or at least, issue a warning).

In such cases, is it bad practice to use a @property declaration? Should I instead use:

-(MyThing*) myThing;

Or, alternatively, is there some way that I can tell @property in the attributes list (nonatomic, readonly, dont_synthesize_this_one_please) that I definitely don't want an instance variable to be sythesized and it's an error if I've missed out the getter?

No, there is no special attribute. If you don't overwrite the getter, the ivar will be synthesized.

Making the property a normal method as you suggest is the best solution. You could also experiment with turning on the following compiler warning:

but then you will get warnings for ALL the synthesized properties.

You can also turn it on for every file separately -Wobjc-missing-property-synthesis