Re: Objective-C and Smalltalk; speed of message send

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

A few additional observations ...

People think writing a benchmark is easy ... the task appears very 
simple ... in fact it's very easy to get things badly wrong.

Benchmarks between different languages are worse ... the languages will 
be designed to do things in different ways and will be better at some 
things than other so that, even where you find seemingly perfect 
matches for control constucts etc, the performances may differ 
markedly, yet because the languages are used differently, this may not 
reflect the overall performance of real world code.

The C family of languages is used with iterative and  procedural 
algorithms ... mostly the compiler does not attempt to recognize or 
optimise recursive code.

Other languages are more designed for recursive algorithms and a good 
compiler for one of these languages will optimise recursive 
function/method operations to avoid call overheads.

Objective-C is C with objects ... intended to be written as such with 
objects mostly being relatively large complex beasts in in which a 
method will do a lot of work and any message send overheads are 
therefore dwarfed by the cost of the work actually done in the method.

So for a 'fair' test of calculating fibonnacci numbers in Smalltalk and 
ObjC, the Smalltalk might use a recursive algorithm while the ObjC  
code mightbe a method encapsulating an interative algorithm.

Of course, then the complaint is raised that we are not comparing like 
with like because we are using different algorithms.

IMO it's therefore pretty impossible to compare language performance 
with simple benchmarks, as one side or the other will always complain 
that the test isn't fair, and both sides will be right.