Re: [Swarm-Support] objective-c vs. java

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Vegard Hartmann wrote:

> As I am working with GA's and swarm simulation I need highly efficient programs 
> and so I am wondering if anyone know what the status is today?
>  
For Swarm 2.2 pretests, well-written programs are nearly as fast in Java 
as they are with Objective C.   There are more libraries, IDEs, and 
experience available for Java than there is for Objective C.  But 
Objective C is C, so you really have control, which means you can get 
more speed by doing things very efficiently.  But most people don't.

As a practical matter, it's quite easy to write a Objective C program 
for Swarm and a Java program and have the Java program be faster.  
Dynamic method dispatch is often overused by people in central parts of 
their simulations and the simulation ends up doing method dispatch a 
high percentage of the time.  In one view, that's not a problem with 
Objective C, that's a problem with the programmer, since they have the 
option of using functions or even inlined functions instead.