> all the blazing speed of Smalltalk
If you're alluding to cost of message send, then it's pretty low, and can easily be made faster in case it becomes noticeable:
http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/performance-comparisons-of-com...
If you're alluding to cost of message send, then it's pretty low, and can easily be made faster in case it becomes noticeable:
http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/performance-comparisons-of-com...
I highly recommend reading the tour of objc_msgSend [2]. It's very eye opening: for example, there's a cache scanning loop even in the fast case.
[1]: http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/artikel/Optimization/opti-3-... [2]: http://www.friday.com/bbum/2009/12/18/objc_msgsend-part-1-th...
Hmm, check the results in the same page for the 64bit Cocoa runtime. This is where most optimizations are made, because Apple used the 32->64 bit transition as an opportunity to do most binary compatibility breaking changes to the language.
There, in 64bit, the IMP cached msg send is actually FASTER than C++ virtual method dispatch.
And if your app's performance suffers because of method calls / msg sends, you are doing it wrong. They should be an insignificant amount of time compared to the actual processing stuff done by your app.