Re: why gnustep is slower than pure objective-c?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Wednesday, October 8, 2003, at 12:20 AM, reuss wrote:

> why?
> because it is a heavy weight framework?
> just curious...
> andras

Not a good/clear question ...

A GNUstep application is slower to start than an objective-c app which 
doesn't load a class library ... because it loads the library.  In the 
same way that a C program which doesn't use libc (I know there aren't 
any in real life) starts faster than one which does.  With an objc 
class library the startup penalties are a bit more than just the work 
done by the dynamic loader, the classes also need to be registered by 
the objc runtime, but the principle is the same.  If you write an objc 
program with a comparable alternative class library it will (more or 
less) start at the same speed as a program using the GNUstep libraries.

Once running, a GNUstep application will run at the same speed as an 
objc application without GNUstep ... or perhaps faster than most, as 
your code can take advantage of optimised existing classes rather than 
writing it all from scratch.