Your code makes no sense:
...
You overwrite $retVal immediately. Maybe you meant:

The objetc's method does return a string, I need a reference to that string, therefore I overwrite the variable with a reference to it's former value just to not need to declare another variable. I found it more readable than the following, which would work, too: $retVal = \$someObject->bar()->doSomething();

In reply to Re^2: unreachable memory with a non-zero reference count by Pickwick
in thread unreachable memory with a non-zero reference count by Pickwick

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